Do patents in the software and Internet industries encourage or impede innovation? Early this month Silicon Flatirons brought together leaders in government, industry, practice, and academia to discuss how law and policy for software patents should evolve to best promote innovation. Their conference, “Software Patents and Their Challenges,” is summarized in this post.
Law professors D. Daniel Sokol and Wentong Zheng, both of the University of Florida - Levin College of Law, have a new paper out that discusses antitrust-related FRAND issues in China.
Do patents in the software and Internet industries encourage or impede innovation? To further understand the arguments of this debate, Silicon Flatirons hosted a conference early this month on Software Patents and Their Challenges. Excerpts from the first panel on the effect of software patents on innovation are presented in this post. TAP scholars Pamela Samuelson and Phil Weiser participated in the discussion.
Professor James Grimmelmann shows how the Federal Circuit court has weakened design patent law in his Washington Post article, “If Our Top Patent Court Screws Up Slipper Patents, How Can It Rule Sensibly on Smartphones?”
Due to the growing importance of mobile devices, app stores are among the most powerful intermediaries in the Internet ecosystem. Last week, in an unprecedented ruling, a federal court held that an app store wasn’t liable for the third party apps it distributed. This highlights the significant restrictions facing the pro-regulatory folks who want to turn app store operators into Internet cops.
Professor Mark Lemley’s new paper challenges the conventional wisdom that short trials favor patentees and questions whether trial location determines the outcome. In “Rush to Judgment? Trial Length and Outcomes in Patent Cases,” Professor Lemley and his co-authors discuss findings from their comprehensive study of every patent trial conducted in the United States between January 1, 2000, and June 30, 2011.
In his article for Wired magazine, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain examines issues of censorship, content altering, and access restrictions that are unique to books in electronic formats.
Today (Monday, July 15th, 2013) economics professor Carl Shapiro, UC Berkeley, discusses the recent efforts from the Obama Administration to protect innovators from frivolous litigation brought by patent-assertion entities.
TAP recently spoke with Professor Mike Ananny about his academic expertise in networked journalism. He discussed how technology intertwines with journalism, his work creating technological toys for language acquisition, and the topic of his next book.
Professor Polk Wagner participated in a conversation about the Prenda lawsuits on Penn Law’s “This Week in Law” podcast. The discussion covered online copyright infringement, copyright trolls, and the specifics of the Prenda lawsuit.