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This post is about Twitter’s recent decision regarding its internally-generated patents. I know I’m late to the party. But I suspect that my own take might be a bit off the wall. Here goes: Twitter is like one of those 12-year-old athletic world champions who are plastered all over the ads, or a child movie star [...]

In 2001 or 2002, I was in a hotel room in Los Angeles with my girlfriend who later became my second (and current) wife. She was feeling depressed and, yet, I was being belligerent with her. In the midst of my rant toward her, she didn’t respond to what I was saying, but instead pointed at [...]

I’ve finally reached the breaking point. Up until now, I’ve been maintaining three separate blogs addressing three different subject matter: “business”, health, and socio-politics. Aside from the suboptimal process of maintaining three separate blogs, this approach has suffered also for reasons of substance. For example, some topics upon which I blog don’t seem to arise [...]

One of my clients (the founder of a revolutionary stealth startup) turned me onto Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why“. I normally don’t much care for business books. But I did like this one. Indeed, proof that I’ve “drunk the Koolaid” of the book is my recently updated LinkedIn profile that now “starts with why”: Mining [...]

Before I launch into dissecting my first patent litigation case, I’m thinking that a little more needs to be said about my own qualifications for doing so. As I’ve noted in previous posts, assessing the quality of a patent is a skill demanding tripartite expertise: law, business, and technology. Here is the basis for my [...]

RPX says: In 2010, NPEs represented approximately 18% of patent litigation in the United States, with 47 such cases in 2000 rising dramatically to more than 550 cases in 2010. NPE litigation has increased almost 500% since 2001. Many people complain about NPEs (a.k.a “trolls”). But few get to the heart of what the problem is [...]

The previous post ends with the question: “Why would I want to do this kind of ‘heavy lifting’ work and blog about it for free, when that’s how I make my money?” The short answer is: marketing. As I noted in the previous post, the work of assessing patent quality is esoteric in nature. Not [...]

I believe the two main reasons why patent quality is not discussed in the press coverage of patent litigations are secrecy and esotericism. To understand why this is, it helps to understand how exactly the quality of a patent is realized. Let’s go back to the NBA analogy. How do we sports fans know which [...]

Patent quality seems to be a little-discussed notion. When news of a noteworthy patent litigation breaks, one rarely if ever reads an analysis of the patent claims at issue. Patent litigation (with a cross-claim) is like a sporting contest, with the refs as the judge, and players as the patents. Can you imagine coverage of [...]

I’m in the process of organizing the corporate paperwork for Jack Polymath LLC. As part of that work, I compiled a list of the regular service providers for the business. These are the providers that “keep the lights on” for us. This does not include employee salaries, nor governmental taxes. It’s just a list of [...]