Continuations

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital continues the topic of Informational Freedom, discussing overreach in the patent system and offering prizes as an alternative mechanism. This is timely as the patent office has unfortunately issued new rules that will make it easier to obtain software patents undoing the tightening from prior Supreme Court decisions. While copyright limits our ability to share knowledge, patents limit our ability to use knowledge to create something. Much like ha...

Another topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations are patents and in particular software patents. While there is a lot of reform that I would love to see I have also come to appreciate that sometimes the only way to get there is in small steps. One relatively meaningful step was just introduced by Senator Schumer. The basic idea is to allow for a much fast tracked review of many of the suspect business process patents used by patent trolls to sue startups and larger tech com...

Earlier this week I blogged about Steven Johnson’s wonderful new book Future Perfect, which lays out the Peer Progressive agenda. I am therefore particularly excited about yesterday’s launch of AskPatents, a collaboration between the USPTO and our portfolio company StackExchange. Joel Spolsky has a great blog post up on the StackExchange blog explaining the origins of and motivation behind AskPatents. The basic idea is to access the broadest network possible to find prior art. Instead of rely...

The patent wars have really been heating up. For some time now Apple has been going around trying to get various Android devices off the market based on patent claims. Now the shoe is on the other foot as a court in Germany has found in favor of Motorola Mobility against Apple based on a patent. Of course Motorola Mobility is in the process of being acquired by Google so that its trove of patents can be used in the fight against Apple and others. Apple is reaping what it has sowed. And in the...

The Supreme Court handed down a bunch of rulings yesterday. The two that I find most interesting relate to patents and guns. Both rulings are disappointing, as I am against software patents and for stricter gun control. But they are also not as terrible as I feared they might be. As far as I can tell, on both counts the Supreme Court handed down fairly narrow rulings. The initial analysis over at Groklaw of the Bilski decision (patents) suggests there are plenty of openings in this ruling for...

My partner Brad put up a great post on the USV blog yesterday, arguing for an independent invention defense against software patents. A while back, I had proposed an alternative, a change in how litigation works. In that post, I wrote that:Some folks have suggested doing away with software patents altogether as a way of addressing this problem. That strikes me as too dramatic a solution as I don’t believe that all software patents are evil. For instance, if someone were to spend years and lot...

A number of companies in the USV portfolio are being sued over patents (e.g., Twitter). For a startup, such a suit is a huge distraction and potentially a major drain on financial resources. Even for large companies such as Microsoft, patent law suits are a real pain to deal with (see Brad Feld’s post on the latest involving XML). Some folks have suggested doing away with software patents altogether as a way of addressing this problem. That strikes me as too dramatic a solution as I don’t bel...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

Growing up in Germany I learned a lot about a legal system in which judges are only applying the law not also making it through their decisions. Precedent plays a very limited roll in the German system. It took me some time to come to grips with the US system. But now I have come to think that an independent judiciary that has the ability to influence the law through precedent is a wonderful balance to the executive and legislative branches. In this 4th of July week this is another independen...

Google buying Motorola is a strong defensive move against both Microsoft and Apple on two fronts: patents and user experience. Apple is vertically integrated and Microsoft controls Nokia (without having had to buy it). Between that and having filed or acquired a lot of patents, these two pose formidable threats to Android. Buying Motorola lets Google fight both of these threats in one go. As Larry Page’s blog post makes clear, Motorola has a huge trove of mobile IP, having invented the first ...