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SO IS CHRISTMAS ??????
LOOKS LIKE THE SHORTS ARE STARTING TO SQUEAL........HOPE IT HURTS !!!!!
NEWBI......THAT'S WHAT I LIKE, STRAIGHT TO THE POINT !!!!!!!
THANKS GB, THAT COULD BE IT ............
just caught the last part of this on fox, but the president was talking about INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and all I heard was and I'm paraphrasing, "I'm looking at intellectual property and we are going after those who abuse it" I wish I had heard more but it does sound encouraging ???????
PENNY2,...... FUNNY WE HAVEN'T HEARD A THING OUT OF RICH INZA ON THIS.. HAS ANYONE HEARD FROM RICH ON ANYTHING ??????
tommy, i'm 78 and have been with voip-pal for 11 years, just thank GOD you got in when you did, i have been waiting for something like this all my life.............hopefully my kids will benefit?????
Why the roots of patent trolling may be in the patent office
Trolls love patents from examiners who are “lenient” about patent vetting.
TIMOTHY B. LEE - 3/5/2018, 7:15 AM
US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia.
Roy Finneren / Flickr
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In recent years, American companies have faced a growing threat from patent assertion entities derisively called "patent trolls." These often shadowy firms make money by threatening patent lawsuits rather than creating useful products. A recent study suggests that the roots of the patent trolling problem may lie with the US Patent and Trademark office—specifically with patent examiners who fail to thoroughly vet patent applications before approving them.
So-called patent trolls "disproportionately purchase and assert patents that were granted by 'lenient' examiners," write Harvard economist Josh Feng and his co-author Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics in a December paper.
Patent examiners don't just decide whether or not to approve a patent. They're also supposed to narrow a patent's claims to make sure it only covers what the inventor actually invented. But some examiners do a better job of this than others. Feng and Jaravel found that examiners who demand the fewest changes to patent claims account for a disproportionate share of patents that ultimately wind up in patent lawsuits.
And these effects are large: the pair found that patents reviewed by examiners who are one standard deviation more "lenient" than average are 63 percent more likely to be purchased by a patent enforcement entity and 64 percent more likely to be involved in litigation.
The study reinforces earlier research suggesting that the country's problems with low-quality patents and rampant patent litigation is driven by inadequate scrutiny of patents by patent examiners. It suggests that giving patent examiners better training and more time to scrutinize each patent could improve patent quality and bring down frivolous patent litigation over time.
Examiners are supposed to police patent claims
The heart of any patent is its claims, a numbered list that specifies exactly what technology the patent covers. An important part of the patent examination process is haggling over the exact wording of these claims.
A patent attorney seeking a patent on behalf of a client will typically seek the broadest possible wording, since that makes the patent more powerful. But patent examiners are supposed to push back, asking for clear and specific language—language that only claims what the inventor actually invented, not a broader class of related technologies.
FURTHER READING
These experts figured out why so many bogus patents get approved
If an examiner is doing a thorough job of vetting patent claims, we would expect the examiner to seek more changes to patent claim language. And most of those changes will involve adding qualifiers to the claim, making it longer. So Feng and Jaravel realized that the change in patent claim length could serve as a proxy for how thoroughly a patent examiner was doing his or her job.
The researchers also looked at how the number of claims in a patent changed between the initial application and the final patent. Often an examiner will approve some claims while ruling that others are too far removed from what the applicant actually invented. This means that more thorough patent examiners are likely to produce a bigger reduction in the number of claims between an initial application and a final patent.
Finally, Feng and Jaravel looked at how many different provisions of patent law examiners cited as grounds for narrowing or rejecting patent claims. Patent law provides a variety of reasons to reject a patent claim, such as obviousness or a lack of novelty. The researchers gathered data on how many different provisions of patent law each examiner invoked, on the theory that a more effective examiner would invoke more patent law provisions, on average.
FURTHER READING
Trolls made 2015 one of the biggest years ever for patent lawsuits
The pair also gathered data about what happened to patents after they were approved—whether they were acquired by a conventional operating company or by a so-called patent troll and whether they were ultimately used in patent litigation.
The results were striking. For example, the researchers looked at patents from examiners whose average change in patent claim length was one standard deviation below average—suggesting that the claims in these patents had received below-average scrutiny. These patents were 13.9 percent more likely to be involved in litigation if they were owned by a regular firm, and they were 40.5 percent more likely to be involved in litigation if they were owned by the kind of firm that often gets accused of patent trolling.
The other measures of examiner leniency showed smaller but still significant effects on the acquisition and use of patents by shadier firms. For example, if an examiner removed one standard-deviation fewer claims from patents than other examiners, her patents were 7.3 percent more likely to be subsequently purchased by patent trolls. Examiners who invoked fewer sections of patent law, on average, produced patents that were more likely to be acquired by patent trolls and used for litigation.
Of course, correlation does not prove causation, and you might worry that these differences reflect examiners being asked to look at different types of patents. But the researchers say they account for this possibility by focusing on comparisons within "art units"—sections of the patent office that focus on a particular category of technology. Some art units assign applications to examiners on an effectively random basis, so two examiners within the same art unit should be getting applications with similar characteristics. The researchers argue that rules out the possibility that the differences are explained by the applications the examiners are receiving rather than the work the examiners are doing.
Should we give patent examiners more time and training?
Back in December, we wrote about research suggesting that patent examiners would be able to do a more thorough job with patent applications if they were given more time. A particular patent examiner's rejection rate tends to go up gradually over time, as he or she gets better at finding valid grounds for rejecting a patent.
However, when an examiner gets a promotion, the pay raise comes with a larger quota, requiring the examiner to spend less time on each application. The result: the examiner's rejection rate suddenly falls, indicating he or she no longer has enough time to do as thorough a job weeding out bad patents.
While those earlier researchers focused on the decision to accept or reject a patent application, Feng and Jaravel focus on ways that patent examiners change a patent before accepting it. And the latter researchers don't have any direct evidence about why some patent examiners seem to do a more thorough job than others.
FURTHER READING
Study suggests patent office lowered standards to cope with backlog
Still, it seems like a reasonable guess that more time would be helpful. When examiners request changes to a patent's claims, they are supposed to provide a legal basis for the changes. Hence, if examiners were given more time to work on each patent, it's likely patents would get reviewed more thoroughly, leading to more changes that make patent language narrower and clearer. And Feng and Jaravel's research suggests that this would make the resulting patents less attractive to patent trolls and less likely to wind up in litigation more generally.
More training might also help. While some examiners may not have time to do a thorough job, others might not be sufficiently familiar with the full range of legal requirements a patent must satisfy.
Of course, giving examiners more training or more time to do their jobs would cost more money. Michael Frakes—a legal scholar at Duke and the co-author of that earlier study showing how patent examiners approve more patents when they have less time to examine them—says that there's a lively debate among patent law experts about whether it makes sense to give the patent office more money to spend weeding out bad patents.
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How a rogue appeals court wrecked the patent system
Frakes points to a famous 2001 paper by patent scholar Mark Lemley, which argued that spending more money weeding out bad patents actually didn't make sense.
"Very few patents are actually litigated or licensed," Lemley argued. "Most simply sit on a shelf unused." So there's an argument in favor of waiting to find out which patents actually matter—and then have the courts litigate whether those patents are actually valid or not.
But Frakes told Ars that argument hasn't aged well. Over the last 17 years, we've seen the rise of patent trolls that exploit the vagueness of patents and the high costs of litigation to extort money out of victims who simply can't afford to vindicate their rights in court. Patent trolling costs the US economy tens of billions of dollars per year. Spending an extra billion weeding out the kind of patents that have fueled the troll boom could be money well spent.
Hope this will come up with a click, way to long to copy whole thing !!!!!
maybe you could go to ars...technica.....
DB, IS IT POSSIBLE THE REASON THERE IS NO MOVEMENT BY THE COURTS IS B/C JUST MAYBE THERE IS SOME BEHIND THE SCENES TALKS GOING ON....... I've seen it before, THE PARTIES REQUEST THAT ALL MOVEMENT BE STOPPED DURING CRUCIAL NEGOTIATIONS ......JUST SAY'EN ?????
PATIENCE AND PRUDENCE WAS A SINGING DUO BACK IN THE LATE 60'S !!!!!!!
YOUR RIGHT HAWK, I GOOGLED (TWITTER ACQUISITION) AND FOUND NO REFERENCE TO LAWSUIT, I KNOW THERE IS A SUIT I JUST DIDN'T FIND ANYTHING "IN PRINT" !!!!!!
BREAKING...... I WAS JUST TOLD THAT TWITTER WAS ON THE BLOCK FOR ACQUISITION, POSSIBLY BY AMAZON, I CHECKED AROUND AND WITH ALL THAT'S WRITTEN, THERE IS NOT ONE WORD ABOUT TWITTER BEING SUED BY VOIP-PAL OR HOW THAT WOULD AFFECT ANY ACQUISITION ?????? ANY THOUGHTS ...........
DB, GOOD POINT ...........
88, I HOPE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THE TEMPERATURE ????????
THANKS DB BUT I WAS KINDA KIDDING, I COPY MY STOCK SHEET EVERY WEEK UNTIL THE "DEED" IS DONE, I'M SURE EVERYTHING WILL BE OK BUT THANK YOU FOR YOUR ADVICE ............
THANKS DB, BIGGEST FEAR IS, I LOOSE ALL (VPLM) STOCK AND NO WAY TO PROVE THAT I OWNED ANY AT ALL ...........HOW'S THAT FOR A BAD DREAM, SCARY !!!
THANKS 88 I'LL TAKE YOUR WORD FOR THAT BUT STILL A "LITTLE" WORRIED !!!
I'M GOING TO MISS MY SCOTTRADER I'VE BECOME COMFORTABLE OVER THE LAST 12 YEARS........ I KNOW WHERE TO GO TO FIND ANYTHING ABOUT (VPLM) NOT SURE ABOUT AMERITRADE ?????
WONDER IF IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH TD AMERITRADE BUYING OUT SCOTTRADE, IT'S SHOULD BE FINISHED BY END OF JANUARY, WHO KNOWS WHAT PROBLEMS THEY ARE RUNNING INTO ?????
well boys & girls we now have 1 more institusional holder on board .....
motley fool wealth management 195,000 @ 0.017 and now
lenox wealth management inc. 20,000 @ 0.002
mov'en right along ???????
THINK THE BLEEDING MAY HAVE STOPPED AGAIN, LET'S HOW FAR IT TAKES US ?????
THANKS NOMO, THAT INFO IS VERY ENCOURAGING ........
GEE THANKS .......
WELL, THE BLEEDING SEEMS TO HAVE STOPPED, MAYBE WE CAN START BUILDING AGAIN ?????
I READ IT ALSO, AND IT APPEARS TO ME WHOEVER TYPED IT IS NOT VERY PROFICIENT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ???????
55, IT BOGGLES MY MIND HOW MUCH POWER APPLE OR ANY OTHER TECH CO. HAS OVER US, WITH THE FLICK OF A SWITCH THEY CAN DARKEN OVER HALF YOUR LIFE AND THERE IS NOT A DAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT..... VOIP-PAL DOES NOT HAVE THAT IN MIND, ALL THEY WANT FROM THESE TECH CO. IS THEIR DUE, NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS !!!!!!
THAT'S B/C YOU CAN ONLY SAY WHAT AGREES WITH THEIR LIBERAL LINE ????LIKE THIS POST !!!!
WHAT'S WITH ALL THOSE 100- 200 -25 TRADES, ARE THOSE MM'S STILL PLAYING GAMES OR AM I MISSING ?????
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHY THEY ARE STILL LAYING DOWN
30- 50 AND 200 TRADES ??????
THERE WILL BE A LOT OF PROFIT TAKING TOMORROW ???????
I DON'T THINK ANYTHING IS IMMINENT, IF IT WAS I DON'T THINK THE MM'S WOULD STILL BE PLAYING GAMES WITH THE STOCK PRICE LIKE THEY ARE, THEY WOULD BE TO AFRAID OF BEING CAUGHT WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN !!!!!!
YA DB, BUT WHAT IF MALIK MAKES A DEAL FOR A BUCK OR A BUCK AND A 1/2, I HEARD HE WAS THINKING ABOUT THAT A FEW MONTHS BACK !!!!!! YOUR THOUGHTS !!
ALL I KNOW ABOUT RS IS ONE DAY I HAD 5000 SHARES OF RNN 2 WEEKS LATER I HAD 500 HUNDRED AND THE PRICE WENT DOWN FROM THERE........BUMMER !!!!!
I SECOND THAT ONE..............
FLY IS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT I'VE SEEN IT A THOUSAND TIMES, IT RUNS UP ON THE NEWS AND WHEN THE NEWS WEARS OFF......... IT DUMPS, HOW FAR DOWN, NO ONE CAN SAY BUT I'M STICK'EN ?????
HERE IS SOMETHING I PICKED UP ABOUT OIL STATES AND "SCOTUS"IT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO SOME ???
It will be patent day at the Supreme Court when the justices return to the bench next Monday for their December sitting. The morning brings a pair of cases considering the “inter partes review” process that Congress added to the patent law in 2011 as part of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. The adoption of inter partes review implements Congress’ desire to shift a share of patent litigation away from the judicial process – criticized as slow and expensive – toward an administrative process that Congress (with considerable naiveté) expected would be swift, inexpensive and uncontroversial.
In general, inter partes review proceeds in two stages. First, competitors unhappy about the issuance of a patent file a petition asking the director of the Patent and Trademark Office to institute a review proceeding. After giving the patent holder an opportunity to respond to the petition, the PTO must decide within three months whether to institute a review proceeding; within the PTO, the decision is made by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. If a competitor convinces the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that the PTO erred in issuing the patent, the board has the authority to invalidate the patent, subject to review by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
The first case of the day will be Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, a high-stakes dispute that directly challenges Congress’ constitutional authority to enact the administrative process of inter partes review. The dispute that presents those questions is remarkably pedestrian. Petitioner Oil States sued respondent Greene’s Energy, contending that Greene’s Energy was infringing a patent that Oil States holds on technology useful for preserving wellhead equipment in the oil and gas industry. Predictably, Greene’s responded by seeking inter partes review, hoping that the PTO would invalidate the Oil States patent. When the PTO concluded that the patent in fact was invalid, Oil States raised the stakes, arguing that Congress violated Article III and the Seventh Amendment when it authorized an administrative agency to invalidate the patent without affording Oil States an opportunity for a jury trial.
The Supreme Court’s consideration of Oil States is a major event because of the intertwined issues of commercial and constitutional consequence. For businesses interested in the patent process, the possibility that the court would eradicate the inter partes review process is momentous; the process has provided significant relief to the operating companies that are so frequently defendants in patent litigation and at the same time has markedly undercut the leverage that patentholders have to enforce rights under their patents. Even putting collective filings of trade associations to the side, more than 100 companies joined in amicus filings. At the same time, because the case directly challenges the statute as an intolerable congressional intrusion on authority that the Constitution allocates to the judicial branch, it raises questions that go directly to one of the most challenging problems of constitutional adjudication. More than 100 academics joined in briefs offering their advice to the justices on those questions. All told, the 57 amicus briefs are the most in any case the justices have heard this term; to put that number in perspective, it’s been more than a year since the justices faced that many amicus filings in a single case. Admittedly, those filings pale before the 90-odd filings they have for Masterpiece Cakeshop the following week, but it is a remarkable level of attention for what is at bottom a commercial dispute between competing businesses.
On the merits, the argument challenging the statute is easy to summarize. At bottom, the idea is that Congress should not be able to remove litigation from federal courts just because it doesn’t like the answers courts give when they decide cases. All agree that the leading motivation for the development of inter partes review was a broadly held perspective that the adjudicative process for patent litigation was working so poorly that it had become a drag on innovation. On the merits of the constitutional argument, all agree that the Supreme Court has used a historical test to assess the boundaries of the judicial power. However ludicrous it might sound as a matter of institutional design, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the boundaries of Congress’ ability to design an effective patent regime will turn largely on the details of practice in the English courts of the mid-18th century. Thus, the briefs of the parties and their amici are redolent with the details of British proceedings going back to the Glorious Revolution in 1688. For its part, the patentholder, Oil States, underscores a longstanding British tradition of judicial adjudication of disputes about the validity and infringement of patents. Oil States views an abrupt departure from that tradition as an unacceptable intrusion on the Constitution’s regime of juries sitting in federal courts.
On the other side of the matter, the allegation that the statute is unconstitutional brings the government into the case as a party. The argument in support of the statute has several distinct strands. For one thing, patents exist wholly as a matter of administrative action. They are, and always have been, the product of an executive grant; the scope and significance of patent rights have never been a matter of common-law accretion. Thus, the allocation of decision-making authority to the executive branch does not raise the same questions as statutes that limit adjudication of common-law causes of action.
For another thing, there has been a long tradition of administrative procedures that reassess the decision to issue a patent. Where Oil States portrays the adoption of inter partes review as an avulsive shift diverting an unbroken course of adjudicative process into the administrative realm, the government portrays it as the most recent configuration of a long and varied series of processes that Congress has prescribed to permit the agency to correct its own mistakes without recourse to adversary litigation. As it happens, that tradition dates at least to the 17th century – when the Privy Council of England exercised the authority to revoke a defective patent in response to a complaint from competitors. Indeed, the historical evidence of common-law adjudication is considerably less plain than the briefs of Oil States and its amici suggest. Among other things, so far as I can tell the courts at law in the late 18th century routinely considered allegations of infringement, but it is much less clear (as an amicus brief from the Internet Association emphasizes) that those courts could entertain claims of invalidity. It is at least arguable that courts of the time considered claims of invalidity as a defense and did not themselves have the power to invalidate patents more broadly.
It would be understandable for a casual observer to think this is an obvious winner for the government: Who could take seriously the idea that the Supreme Court would announce that the Constitution does not give Congress the authority to do something so obviously practical as update the administrative process for patent review? Ordinarily, we would expect that Congress would have all but unreviewable discretion over those kinds of determinations. The lesson of the Supreme Court’s cases in this area, though, suggests that considerable caution is appropriate. The drafters of the Bankruptcy Code of 1978 were just as sincere as the drafters of this statute in their view that concerns of procedural efficacy justified replacing a badly broken judicial process with a more administrative process. Yet the Supreme Court had no hesitancy in invalidating the framework as an impermissible derogation from the judicial power – despite the Constitution’s explicit grant to Congress of authority to manage the bankruptcy process (parallel to the clause giving Congress authority over the patent system).
I think it is safe to say that the justices will come to the Oil States argument keenly interested in exploring the validity of Congress’ handiwork.
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in this case. The author of this post, however, is not affiliated with the firm.]
Posted in Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC, Featured, Merits Cases
Recommended Citation: Ronald Mann, Argument preview: Justices to cons
PTAB IS IN A DILEMMA, ON ONE HAND ALL EYES ARE GOING BE ON THOSE JUDGES AND ON THE OTHER HAND THEY ARE IRREDEEMABLY IN THE TANK FOR APPLE AND PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN PAYED FOR A FAVORABLE (TO APPLE) OUTCOME ........Hmmmmm
I'M SORRY LT, I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE MADE THAT HEADER A LITTLE MORE CLEAR, I GOT THIS FROM RICH INZA AND I BELIEVE IT WAS RICH THAT WAS GOING TO THAT HEARING............ VERY SORRY FOR THE CONFUSION !!!!!!!
This article was in today's Washington Times regarding the the PTAB and the upcoming Oil States case coming up before the Supreme Court later this month. I will be there in attendance at the oral arguments.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/9/inventors-patent-office-favors-big-tech/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/9/inventors-patent-office-favors-big-tech/
News for 'VPLM' - (DJ Voip-Palcom Inc, Inst Holders, 3Q 2017 (VPLM))
The following table shows the largest shareholders in VOIP PAL COM COM (VPLM) for the quarter ended September 30, 2017, listed by holding size. The list represents up to 50 of the largest holders in the company.
Note: Unless otherwise mentioned the reporting date is 09/30/2017
Institution Shares Shares % Last
Held Changed Held Report
Motley Fool Wealth Management 195,000 0 0.017 06/30
Lenox Wealth Management Inc. 20,000 20,000 0.002 06/30
13F data provided by: Factset Research Systems Inc.;
Please send questions to ownership@factset.com.
Copyright, Factset Research Systems, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 19, 2017 04:33 ET (08:33 GMT)- - 04 33 AM E