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 trashy are Apple's iPhone Patents?

Very excrement-like, since they didn't ask me to do the patentability searches :-) But more seriously, the February 9th issue of Barrons has an article on Apple's iPhone patents, with Apple COO Tim Cook quoting as stating that Apple won't stand for having its IP ripped off (with hints that the intended target is Palm, though Apple doesn't mind ripping off inventors). However the same article quotes San Francisco investment analyst Pablo Perez-Fernandez as raising doubts about the strength of Apple's iPhone patent portfolio, much of which focuses on touchscreen technology:

He asserts that the U.S. Patent Office "may have not observed the requirements of innovation on number of occasions", that the legal owner of key multi-touch technologies may be the University of Delaware, and that "the essential discoveries embedded in Apple's products were the result of the work of academics from the university now employed at Apple."

He goes on:

Apple didn't invent transparent, capacitive multitouch sensors that could be overlaid on screens; "that honor went to ATT's famous Bell Laboratories back in the mid-1980s."

His conclusion: while Apple's patents are probably infringed by competitors, the competitors could strike back on invalidity grounds. And I suspect he is right. Despite all of the bull's shirt from the big companies that complain about crappy patents that issue, they are all notorious for routinely submitting crappy patents with inadequate prior art references.

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.