Skilled immigrants are returning to their native countries

The first article is from the 16 March 2009 edition of Business Week, page 68, by Vivek Wadhwa America's Immigrant Brain Drain. His discussion focuses mainly on Chinese and Indian skilled immigrants, and their reasons for returning to their native countries are simple - better quality of life (even at a lower average pay), better career prospects (China is figuring out how much it will grow this year, not whether it will grow or fall, and growth creates careers), and the comfort of family and friends. Immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley's tech companies, and get many of the Masters and PhDs awarded in science and engineering. And demand for their skills is growing in their home countries. So why can this be bad for America's economy? The ominous portend of this trend is discussed in the second article that appears in the March 7th edition of the Economist, in an article on page 84 Give my your scientists ... - restricting the immigration of highly skilled workers will hurt America's ability to innovate. A few paragraphs that make use of patent data in an interesting way:

Addressing these issues requires data on just how inventive immigrants are, a question that until recently was the province of educated guesswork. But William Kerr, an economist at Harvard Business School, used name-matching software to identify the ethnicity of each of the 8 million scientists who had acquired an American patent since 1975. He found that the share of patents awarded to scientists born in America fell between 1975 and 2004. The share of all patents given to scientists of Chinese and Indian descent living in America more than tripled, from 4.1% in the second half of the 1970s to 13.9% in the years between 2000 and 2004. Nearly 40% of patents filed in 2005 by Intel, a silicon chip maker, were for work done by people of Chinese or Indian origin. Some of these patents may have been awarded to American-born children of earlier immigrants, but Mr. Kerr reckons that most changes over time arise from fresh immigration. What of the criticism that these workers are displacing native scientists who would have been just as inventive? To address this, Mr. Kerr and William Lincoln, an economist at the University of Michigan, used data on how patents responded to periodic changes in the number of H1B entrants. If immigrants were merely displacing natives, increases in the H1B quota should not have let to increases in innovation. But Kerr and Lincoln found that when the federal government increased the number of people allowed in under the program by 10%, total patenting increased by around 2% in the short run. This was driven mainly by more patenting by immigrant scientists. But even patenting by native scientists increased slightly, rather than decreasing as proponents of crowding out would have predicted

Intellectual Ventures buys up Transmeta's portfolio

It is a rather interesting time to buy a microprocessor patent portfolio. Tech PC sales and related probably will drop a bit in 2009. From an article by Rick Merritt in EE Times, (01/28/2009 9:02 PM EST):

SAN JOSE, Calif. ‹ Intellectual Ventures, a patent development and licensing company, has acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta Corp., a startup that made an unsuccessful bid to develop x86-compatible processors. The portfolio includes more than 140 issued U.S. patents and others pending and issued in the U.S. and elsewhere. The announcement comes as Novafora Inc., a venture-backed company founded in 2004, said it completed the $255.6 million acquisition of Transmeta originally announced in November. Novafora will use Transmeta's technology to boost its video processor designs; Intellectual Ventures will license the Transmeta technology on a non-exclusive basis. "The acquisition of the Transmeta semiconductor patents augments one of the most comprehensive patent portfolios in the semiconductor field which now includes more than 2,000 patents," said Paul Reidy, vice president of semiconductor licensing at Intellectual Ventures. "Some of the recently issued patents detail some of the most interesting breakthroughs in microprocessor architecture we've seen in the last decade or so," he added in a press statement. Transmeta had generated royalty revenues of about $300 million licensing its patents on areas such as low-power processors and code translation to chip makers including Intel Corp. Novafora did not indicate what role the patent transaction played in its purchase of Transmeta. "The addition of Transmeta's power management technology to our video processor will enable us to target Novafora's products to the broadest range of video-oriented devices," said Zaki Rakib, chief executive of Novafora. In November, Novafora announced it entered into a non-exclusive patent license agreement with Advanced Micro Devices. Under the terms of the agreement, AMD transferred to Transmeta 700,000 shares of Transmeta's Series B Preferred Stock held by AMD.

How IP will become a major influence in acquisition and merger deals

From the 15 December issue of the National Law Journal, page 3: More than half of corporate and private equity executives believe that intellectual property will become a more important factor in mergers and acquisitions deals during the next five years, according to a new survey from deal-ranking company, the Mergermarket Group. Eighty-five percent of corporate respondents and 72% of private equity respondents to the survey also said a target company's intellectual property assets had importance equal to or greater than other corporate assets when M&A deals were on the table. K&L Gates and Boston-based consulting firm CRA International sponsored the survey. Given the global increase in patents and trademarks, it's not surprising that intellectual property is becoming a more important factor in M&A deals, said George Dickos, a Pittsburgh lawyer and co-ordinator of K&L Gates' intellectual property practices.

How electronic medical records will become another mini-bubble

One component of Obama's recovery plan is to pour billions into electronic medical records. There are already tons of patents in this field, and lots of venture capital. But Forbes editor Lee Gomes, in the 12 January edition of Forbes, page 43, argues that doing so might make medicine more inefficient, i.e., more costly. "But the notion they're a panacea is a symptom of the fixation with high-tech gadgets that's part of the (healthcare) problem in the first place." Sounds like the PTO - fixing engineering management at the PTO is not a tech problem.

How is billable hour on the way out?

The 12 January edition of Forbes, on page 26, has a full page opinion piece written by Evan Chester, presiding partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He basically argues that it is time to stop billing by the hour for legal services: "The lawyer should identify the client's objectives, measure, calculate and come back with a [fixed] price." Would this work in the patent world? (It's a rhetorical question :-)

Patents, The $50 Billion Fraud and Globalism

Business Week columnist Michael Mandel has an excellent article just published about how the last ten years of American and global finance was built much on lies. The article is at: "Madoff and the Global Economy: The world was told the U.S. was a low-risk, high-return investment. But like the Wall Street trader's victims, we are learning the truth." The article is at: www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2008/db20081214_802212.htm Why was the U.S. not a low-risk, high return investment economy? "First, the U.S. economy was supposed to be on the cutting edge of innovation. Innovation through technological change, by nature, is a very risky activity. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't. If the investment in innovation pays off, the economy booms, as it did during the second half of the 1990s. But innovation has fallen short in recent years. Biotech and nanotech still have not come to fruition, and alternative energy is moving slowly. As a result, the U.S. economy as fallen short of expectations. The income isn't there, and the debt just piles up." Important to this is the ability for investors, domestic and foreign, to be able to recognize real innovation. While real innovation is measured much by commercial success (a reason the secondary factors of Graham should be the primary factors), one measure of real innovation is the association of the innovation with a quality patent, a vital role of the Patent Office in the national economy. The patent indicates that the inventor thinks there is enough commercial potential to more than cover the costs of patent prosecution and litigation (a useful sign to an investor). A high quality patent lessens the risk of the litigation on the side of the inventor (which is why large companies like IBM encourage the PTO to issue tons of crappy patents - it hurts IBM's competitors more than it hurts IBM). High quality patents help minimize the risk for investors in investing in recent innovation. (And to correct Michael, there wasn't much real innovation in the second half of the 1990s, if you look at those patents. The Internet bubble was driven as much by the arbitraging of personal information about consumers and their spending habits, as opposed any great advances in computing technology). But that association (innovation and quality patent) simply isn't happening. I ask, when the average patent issues, can the average investor really say that the patent is novel, unobvious and fully enabled? No, they can't. Sure many patents do have reasonable quality, but many don't - enough of a parity that without paying a lot of money for a validity opinion, the average investor has to guess which patent is high quality. PTO management's solution: reject everything, which while killing the crap, also kills patents that protect real innovation. For this reason alone, much of current PTO mismanagement has to be swept out by the next PTO Director. And that the PTO Board of Appeals has to distort engineering principles to help PTO management reject everything is reason enough for the next PTO Director to do a sweeping overhaul of the Board. Small companies with real innovation are being hurt in two big ways. First, they are running out of money in this economic climate to pay to fight idiotic rejections and other games being played with appeals. They are being forced to abandon their patent applications. Second, assume they survive an increasingly expensive examination process while doing what it takes to obtain a high quality patent (starting with good searching), their quality patent gets lost in the noise of all of the crappy patents being issued, in most cases, to big companies such as IBM that flood the PTO with uninnovative patent applications. So if all of the politicians in this country, starting with President Obama, really believe their mindless chanting about how technology and innovation is going to save the U.S. economy, they better start paying attention to the incompetence and corruption at one of the chokepoints in innovation commercialization - at the Patent Office. As one of the worst PTO Directors in recent times, Bruce Lehman (so horrible of a PTO Director that Congress passed a law requiring the PTO Director to be competent in patent and trademark law, which Lehman wasn't) once said: "Issused patents should be checks in the banks, not licenses to sue." Checks in the bank, as in the issuance of a high quality patent should lead to investment dollars for those patentees seeking such support. A high quality issued patent is an information signal to the investment markets. It should be relatively easy for investors to detect such signals. But right now, the signal/noise ratio is too high. Because of incompetent PTO management. Which betrays the investing public. This country can't afford to play politics with the appointment of the next PTO director - no legislative aides, no academics, and no one whose experience is at companies that have undermined the patent system. Also, someone suggested to me that the next PTO Director must be someone who publicly opposed the continuation rules package, and/or publicly opposed the PTO in Bilski.

Harvard spinout licenses "black silicon" patents

by Dylan McGrath, EE Times, (10/13/2008 3:09 PM EDT) SAN FRANCISO - Startup SiOnyx Inc. has licensed a portfolio of shallow junction photonics patents from Harvard University in exchange for an unspecified equity stake and downstream royalties. The patents cover a laser implant technique said to alter alters the photonic properties of semiconductors. This technology, known as "black silicon," was discovered by Harvard's Eric Mazur, a professor of physics and applied physics. Mazur co-founded SiOnyx (Beverly, Mass.) in 2006. According to a joint statement issued by SiOnyx and Harvard's Office of Technology Development Monday (Oct. 13), black silicon is a material that absorbs nearly twice the visible light of regular silicon and detects infrared light that is normally invisible to silicon based devices. This capability that allows for performance enhancements in applications ranging from simple light detection to advanced digital imaging and solar energy, according to the statement. SiOnyx said it is is producing devices for scalable platform for hyper-spectral imaging. The SiOnyx implant is compatible with established semiconductor manufacturing processes and introduces no new material, according to the company. SiOnyx has a patented process that employs femtosecond laser processing of the target material resulting in an extremely thin (300nm) photoconduction layer applicable to both biased (detection) and photovoltaic (power generation) applications, the company said. "Black silicon addresses the fundamental pain point in all photonics systems, the sensitivity to light," said Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx president and CEO. "By demonstrating that the black silicon process cost effectively scales within the established semiconductor device manufacturing infrastructure, SiOnyx is poised to transform the $10B+ light detection, imaging and photovoltaic markets by offering device manufactures a path to smaller, lighter and more efficient photonic systems." SiOnyx recently raised $11 million in funding from Harris & Harris, Polaris Venture Partners and RedShift Ventures. Copyright © 2008 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC All rights reserved

Verizon has lost an infringement lawsuit against Cox

Below is a news item that Verizon has lost an infringement lawsuit against Cox, with a jury ruling that there was no infringement. The lawsuit was the classic "troll" tactic - sue a little guy (Cox) before going after the big companies. Now one reason trolls are so labeled (I prefer patent yakuzas to troll) is that they are falsely criticized for not practising the technology in the patent. But assuming that is a legitimate criticism, what do you call it when the patent tr-ll denies the technology .... TO ITS CUSTOMERS? From the article: "Verizon has been aggressively asserting its patents in Internet phone technology, despite not promoting the service to its own customers." Sounds like a tyrant to me - and thus making Verizon a tyrant troll. If one is going to engage in silly labeling of problems in the patent world. Verizon Loses Patent Lawsuit Against Cox By AMOL SHARMA Verizon Communications Inc. lost its patent-infringement case against Cox Communications Inc., signaling that Verizon may have a difficult time extracting royalties from cable providers for Internet-based telephony. A federal jury in the Eastern District of Virginia found that Cox didn't infringe on six Verizon patents related to Internet telephony. Cox, which has more than three million residential and business phone customers, said in a statement it would "look forward to competing vigorously with Verizon in the marketplace, not the courtroom." Verizon has been aggressively asserting its patents in Internet phone technology, despite not promoting the service to its own customers. Many analysts and patent lawyers said its case against Atlanta-based Cox, which was filed early this year, was a prelude to further lawsuits against bigger cable rivals. Verizon was seeking past damages from Cox of $404 million. "Despite the decision, we believe our patents were infringed," Verizon said in a statement. "We will continue to innovate and protect our intellectual property." The New York company said it hasn't decided whether to appeal the decision. Cox argued that it wasn't liable because it doesn't actually offer Internet phone service. While its call traffic is broken into digital voice "packets," it isn't routed over the public Internet, the company said. Cox said it controls the calls through its own cable network. A Verizon spokesman declined to say whether the company would target other major cable providers like Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp. with patent lawsuits. Verizon recently reached a deal with Comcast Corp. in which both companies agreed not to sue each other for patent infringement for a period of five years. That agreement covers all patents the companies hold. Write to Amol Sharma at amol.sharma@wsj.com Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

UC Berkley to offer degrees in Financial Engineering

Next Monday, the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley is having an afternoon panel lecture for business school students seeking degrees and jobs in their newly invented field of financial engineering. Is the use of "engineering" here the same as in "electrical engineering"? Or does "financial engineering" refer to doing finance while erroneously drinking lots of alcohol - "financial in-Gin-erring" (which watching Wall Street implode is a reasonable alternative). UC Berkeley is one of the leading engineering schools and one of the leading business schools, so their use of the word means much. If in their minds, and the minds of other universities offering degrees in financial engineering, is that "engineering" is being used in the same way as with "electrical engineering" and "chemical engineering", i.e., applied science, then FOR ALL YOU IDIOTS - business methods belong to a technical field of knowledge. To all of the anti-Bilski people (at least those of your whose financial firms are not bankrupt) - either learn the science and engineering or shut up. Consider the flyer for the panel lecture, and notice the words used: "The recent explosive growth and current events in quantitative finance have led mathematics, physics, computer science, economics and engineering students of all levels to wonder whether a career in quantitative finance is right for them." Notice all of the fields of students they suggest this pathway: mostly fields of science and engineering as preparation for a career in financial engineering - how can anyone (outside PTO/EPO management) deny that there is much that is technical - applied science - here? The flyer continues: "With the rapid increase in sophisticated quantitative and computational techniques employed in financial firms there has been increasing demand for students with highly quantitative backgrounds to work in the financial field." "For more information, please visit the the Berkeley MDE Master's in Financial Engineering program, http://mfe.haas.berkeley.edu" So the PTO, EPO, CAFC, House of Lords, etc., all must ask themselves one question here: is this use of "engineering" the same as when the word is used in phrases like "electrical engineering"? If so, many business methods are as technical as anything else is technical. When Wall Street bond traders are using quantum field theory to calculate interest rates, what idiot denies they are not being technical - not engaged in engineering? When Wall Street traders subscribe to the montly "Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities", are they deluding themselves as to the relevance of "technical"? No.

Twin lawyers charged with court fraud

From New York Times, 27 September page A7: "An Italian lawyer has been charged with fraud and false representation because she is suspected of having her identical twin sister fill in for her during court hearings. The lawyer, was also a part-time judge near Milan, helping other judges with heavy caseloads. But when she had to fill both roles, she twice sent her sister, who is not a lawyer, in her place, collecting legal fees even when she was elsewhere. The sisters will be tried next month.

PHARMACEUTICAL AD FOR ER-DYSFUNCTION FALSELY CLAIMS A PATENT

The August 25th San Francisco Chronicle, page A5, had an ad (one in many other newspapers, I suspect), from the BostonMedicalGroup.com for their proprietary process for treating performance dysfunction for those men for which the new pills don't work. One sentence caught my eye: "The secret to Boston Medical Group's success lies in The BMG Method, a proprietary treatment process for Urecktyle Dysfunction that recently received a U.S. patent. The group is the only physician network known to have acquired such a patent, ..." But what is the patent number? The ad doesn't mention it, I couldn't find it on the BMG Web site, nor could I find any patent assigned to Boston Medical Group, or two of its doctors mentioned in the ad - Barry Buffman and Alan Sperber. I am always suspicious of small companies touting patents in medical ads, because the existence of the patent means little medically, and it is all the more suspicious when it is so hard to find the actual patent.

Tax reform kills used car donations

The 10 September Wall Street Journal, page D3, reports that far fewer people are donating their automobiles to charities after the tax laws were changed so that donors could only deduct the sales price of the automobile after the charity sold the car, not the book value. In 2004, under the old rules, 901,000 taxpayers claimed the deduction for a total amount of $2.4 billion, while in 2005 under the new rules, 297,000 people claimed the deduction for a total amount of $470 million, a two billion dollar difference. This tax law change came about in part because large U.S. companies were donating patents to universities, and similarly claiming large values for the patent (see the relevant post), even if the recipient did nothing economically with the patent. Under the new tax law, companies donating patents can only deduct whatever the recipient earns from the patent, much like with the automobile deductions. And I suspect much like the automobile deductions, there has been significant drops in the number of companies claiming large deductions for their donated patents. In both cases, the taxpayers were being scammed.

New York Times' David Brooks on patent reform

In a Sept. 12 op-ed piece in the New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks criticizes the financial market policy engineering of the Bush Administration. At one point he writes, and correctly so, "A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself." A good way to describe this Administration's patent reform initiatives. And let's just say that if the PTO had a tradeable stock, it would be at the top of the new you-can't-short-losers stock list. And once again I urge the CAFC, in the Bilski case, to ignore any arguments from all of the bankrupt and bailout-recipient financial companies. Their operations are as incompetent as their Bilski arguments.

How Disney might have lost the Mickey Mouse copyrights

The 22 August LA Times has an interesting article on Disney's copyrights for Steamboat Willie and its substantially similar Mickey Mouse characters. The primary question is of simple copyright law: is the copyright registration for Steamboat Willie defective and thus is the character in the public domain? The more intriguing dilemma - if Steamboat Willie is in the public domain (argument below), can people sell substantially similar Mickey Mouse products and defend themselves by arguing that they are substantially similar to the uncopyrighted Steamboat Willie? Disney has trademarked "Mickey Mouse", so you would have to use a different name for a new product line based on using the public domain Steamboat Willie. The controversy starts with a copyright lawsuit involving one of the few Mickey Mouse movies not copyrighted, a 1933 short called "The Mad Doctor", for which someone was trying to sell animations cells. Disney lawyers rightfully pointed out that Mickey Mouse itself was still under copyright, so the cell seller couldn't sell. The loser, one Gregory Brown, consoled himself with an odd argument that the Disney lawyers had made - that Mickey Mouse had been created by Walt Disney Company in 1928. Problem. The company didn't exist in 1928. Whose name then is on the copyright forms? Digging around, Brown found a clue on the title card to the beginning of the "Steamboat Willie" cartoon that was released on a 1993 LaserDisc, which said: "Disney Cartoons Present A Mickey Mouse Sound Cartoon, Steamboat Willie - A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks, Recorded by Powers Cinephone System, Copyright MCMXXIX" MCMXXIX is the Disney's lawyer's 1929 reference - but to Steamboat Willie. Brown unsuccessfully tried arguing in his court case that any of these three parties (Disney, Iwerks, Powers) might claim ownership, an uncertainty that nullifies all ownership claims under the arcane rules of the Copyright Act of 1909. And since Steamboat Willie is so substantially similar to Mickey Mouse, if Willie is in the public domain, it makes it practically impossible for Disney to defend any copyright claims to substantially similar Mickey Mouse knockoffs. Fun stuff, huh. The judge ignored the argument for coming too late in Brown's case. However, in 1999, Arizona State University law student Lauren Vanpelt reviewed Brown's findings, and wrote/posted a paper "Mickey Mouse - A Truly Public Character," , in the public domain, pretty much agreeing with Brown - Willie. She concludes, quite powerfully and definitively (she is not a law professor yet): "Disney published its common law protected expression without the proper copyright notice attached to the films and on the club materials. The statute of limitations to rectify that omission has long since elapsed, as has the statute of limitations for Disney to file any infringement claims based on that omission. As a result of its omissions and inaction, Disney forfeited its copyright claims to Mickey Mouse. Mickey has fallen into the public domain where all are free to copy and enjoy him." Shortly thereafter, a Georgetown University law student, Douglas Hedenkamp, reviewed Vanpelt's paper, and did additional research at the Library of Congress, and agreed - there is too much ambiguity into who owns the copyrights to Steamboat Willie. And under the 1909 laws (courts rely on the laws at the time of something happening), the ownership must be unambiguous, which isn't the case here, a requirements courts have repeatedly upheld. A rough looking version of Hedenkamp's article is at:http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/publicdoma in/HedenkampFreeMickeyMouseVaSp&E(2003).htm Hedenkamp concludes, again powerfully and definitively (he wasn't a law professor at the time :-), with: Ultimately, if all the material incorporated into the films published without notice is in the public domain, this means that the character Mickey Mouse is himself public domain material. Mickey would still be protected by the copyrights in his other films and products, but those copyrights would only extend to the new matter that is original to them. [FN161] The aspects of Mickey's image and character that were derived from the original public domain films cannot be protected by virtue of their inclusion in new works; this is true under both the 1909 Act and the Current Act. [FN162] This means that the public is free to exercise all of the rights that the Copyright Act would otherwise reserve to the holder of a valid copyright. [FN163] This includes the rights to copy, display and distribute the films, and to make, display and distribute derivative works based on those films and the Mickey Mouse character. [FN164] In response to a letter from Hedenkamp, Disney General Counsel Louis Meisinger wrote back saying the equivalent of "all of you are wrong", and threatened legal action if Hedenkamp went public. Fortunately Hedenkamp has balls and a knowledge of constitutional law (something IP lawyers are mostly forbidden to consider :-), and published an article in the 2003 edition of the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal. The end of the LA Times articles goes: Meisinger, the former general counsel, is now a Los Angeles County judge. Asked about the Hedenkamp article in an interview in his chambers, Meisinger gave an instant nod of recognition but ignored an invitation to take up the argument again. "Everything has to fall into the public domain sometime.", he said, then headed back to court. Which is a pathetic implicit concession that indeed Brown/Vanpelt/Hedenkamp are correct - Steamboat Willie is in the public domain. Since LA Times was able to write this article in 2008, five years after Hedenkamp's paper, with the question unresolved, is further support that Steamboat Willie is in the public domain. Disney rightfully zealously defends its intellectual properties, which apparently it can't do here as proved by the possibility of an article five years later in 2008. If Disney could have fixed the defect, it would have done so after Vanpelt's and Hedenkamp's papers - Disney has the money and legal brainpower to easily fix such problems. And the LA Times could have reported "Despite the controversy, in 200X, lawyers for Disney successfully reinstated the copyrights to its Steamboat Willie character." Question. How to have some fun with this (assuming one has lots of money to play litigation games)? Would it take setting up a Web site that freely distributes Steamboat Willie videos to upset Disney enough to have them file the copyright lawsuit that resolves this question? Or what would happen if someone wrote a letter to the Library of Congress, asking them who are the assigned names to Steamboat Willie? Is there a legal problem in accepting licensing money for a something that has now been shown to be unlicensable? Where is the professor Jon Duffy of the copyright academic world to file a lawsuit to force the issue? This case once again shows how much of a bag of hot air is the mind of Larry Lessig, since he could strike a great blow for all of his pretend copyright causes by doing something with Steamboat Willie that would force Disney to sue Larry.

ANOTHER PROFESSOR GENERATES STUPID ARTICLE ON PATENT REFORM

The 11 August 2008 edition of Forbes, page 30, has an opinion piece by real estate law professor Michael Heller of Columbia Law School on patent reform. What's next, an article on patent reform by divorce settlement law professor? If nothing else, his opinion piece supports the argument that Mark Chandler of Cisco and his ilk in the CPF are whiners. Heller argues that too many crappy biotech/pharm patents are stifling research and driving up litigation costs. His solution? Change the formula for patent litigation damages (gee, I wonder where Heller gets some of his academic support)? Not once in the article is any mention of reforming the incompetent and corrupt PTO management, which gets rid of most of the problems Heller and Chandler whine about. That's the law professors' solution to every legal problem - anything (like more legislation) but what might actually solve the problem. Columbia Law School is near New York University, which means nothing, except it gives me an opportunity to insult once again the IBM scam otherwise knows as the NYU Patent Public Peer Review joke.

Blacklight hydrinos are back and get written up in Fortune

Those of you in the patent world with a background in physics have long enjoyed the saga of free-energy inventor Randell Mills, CEO of BlackLight Power, who claims (including in patent claims) that it is possible to generate (free) energy from hydrinos, which are hydrogen atoms one state below the ground state. The Patent Office, in one of its few times where it relied on the physics community and modern physics, has refused to issue any patents to BlackLight, arguing that it is false physics to argue that hydrogen can have a ground state lower than the ground state. Anyway, the September 2008 issue of Fortune Small Business has an article on BlackLight Power. The paragraph 112 test of the patenting laws is next Fall 2009, when they claim they will start installing the energy cells in working power plants.

THE FIRST ROTATING HOUSE TURNS 50

Tuesday's New York Times carries a nice article on Belgian independent inventor Francois Massau (1905-2002), who in 1958 built one of the first rotating houses, a patentable artistic-engineering idea becoming more popular, since such houses captures/blocks more sunlight for free heating/cooling.

PTO RESISTS ATTEMPTS TO TRADEMARK "CLOUD COMPUTING"

Last week's (Monday's) New York Times, Business Section page 1, has an article on how the PTO is fighting lame attempts by computer companies to trademark the term "cloud computing" (basically, time-sharing re-fashioned into server farms). In August, for example, the PTO rejected a trademark application from Dell, after industry experts complained that the term had become a broadly used term associated with large numbers of companies/universities, and thus could not serve as a mark to identify one random company. Microsoft has a trademark application on "live mesh" pending. The article has a picture of, and comments from, Trademark Commissioner Lynne Beresford. One statistic: 85 percent of the PTO's trademark examining attorneys work primarily from home.

Knock-off drug maker Teva Pharmaceutical finds itself being copied

The 11 August 2008 edition of Forbes, on page 58, has a knee-slapping article on mediocre though profitable generic drug maker Teva Pharmaceutical. For years Teva has made lots of money copying other companies' drugs, is now buying up patent-protected drug lines that it can sell, only to find out that other generic companies are copying Teva's patent-protected drugs. What goes around, comes around.

Jellyfish is good and bad and uncertain

Sunday's New York Times had an article about growing jellyfish problems around the world as a sign of dying oceans. One interesting comment: "Jellyfish ... are relatively harmless, in fact are the cockroaches of the open waters, ...".