I don’t often discuss non-IP topics here, but this article about Twitter’s chief lawyer Alexander Macgillivray and Twitter’s commitment to respecting users’ free speech rights is well worth a read: “We value the reputation we have for defending and respecting the user’s voice,” Mr. Macgillivray said in an interview here at Twitter headquarters. “We think it’s [&hellip
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared in TechCrunch. In the wake of Apple’s billion-plus dollar win in their patent suit against Samsung last week, much of the focus appears to be on the flaws in the patent system. Many argue that the suit involved patents that are “obvious,” and that Apple is a bully in enforcing them. [&hellip
Editor’s Note: Please excuse my long layoff from posting to this blog. Other work-related matters have made focusing on writing difficult. My latest article appeared in TechCrunch over the weekend, and I think it is very relevant to my audience so I am reblogging here as well. A recent TechCrunch guest post by Jeffrey Shieh suggests that startups [&hellip
Editor’s Note: This article originally appears in TechCrunch. As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Manyinvestors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over [&hellip
Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted in TechCrunch. In the past few months, Facebook’s patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and22 [&hellip
Twitter is an innovative company, and today’s introduction of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement shows that their legal department can be innovative too. The Innovator’s Patent Agreement, a draft of which was released on GitHub, will allow inventors to retain control of their inventions to make sure that they are only used for defensive purposes. This [&hellip
A successful business person understands that in order to stay ahead of the competition, he or she must stay informed about the competition. One way to stay informed is to monitor competitors’ publications issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). These publications include published non-provisional patent applications and issued patents. Generally, non-provisional [&hellip
We missed last week, so hopefully this lengthy startup patent report will make up for it. For the week of Tuesday, March 20, 2012, there were 5,414 U.S. patents issued by the USPTO. There are a number of notable patents issued this week, including ones to Like.com (Google), Box.net, Zynga, Zillow, TopCoder, Cleversafe, 38 Studios, [&hellip
I have written previously that Twitter only has a single published patent application to its name and no patents. The application is the famous pull down to refresh application which was acquired with Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie. While it is possible that Twitter has other unpublished patent applications pending at the USPTO, it is clear [&hellip
You will read and hear a lot regarding software patents in the aftermath of the lawsuit filed by Yahoo vs Facebook over ten of its patents. For example, Mark Cuban hopes this lawsuit leads to a 50 billion dollar judgment for Yahoo in order to bankrupt Facebook and incite change in the patent system through [&hellip