CEA will join the United for Patent Reform coalition, the group that the National Retail Federation and others launched in January to promote enactment of patent reform legislation, CEA said Wednesday. President Gary Shapiro said in a statement: “A tsunami of bogus patent claims is killing jobs and innovation, while costing the U.S. economy $1.5 billion a week. Republicans, Democrats and the White House all agree that the patent extortion racket must be stopped. Congress must expeditiously pass the Innovation Act to hold patent trolls accountable for their frivolous lawsuits and baseless threats.” Though CEA has made patent reform one of its highest legislative priorities, it stopped short in January of committing to joining the coalition, saying only it was “considering how we can be most helpful” (see 1501200025). Coalition members from the tech industry include Adobe, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Google, Oracle and Verizon. The coalition's website says membership spans a wide diversity of companies and trade groups from many industries.
Patent reform legislation introduced by Sen. Chris Coons, R-Del., lacks the robustness needed to stop frivolous patent litigation, said CEA President Gary Shapiro Tuesday. The Coons legislation, called the Support Technology and Research for Our Nation’s Growth (STRONG) Patents Act, “has a few modest provisions aimed at improving our patent system,” Shapiro said. "Halting the epidemic of bogus patent lawsuits will require a more robust and multifaceted approach, including fee-shifting, similar to that taken by the Innovation Act,” Shapiro said. “The STRONG Patents Act appears less like real patent reform and more like a patent troll-led effort to draft a ‘fig leaf’ bill for senators to sign on to so they can pretend they are supporting patent reform, while shielding the legalized extortion of the patent trolls.”
Ericsson sued Apple over 41 patents covering many aspects of iPhones and iPads, said the plaintiff in a news release Friday. After Apple refused the offer to have a court determine fair licensing terms binding to both companies, Ericsson filed two complaints with the International Trade Commission and seven with the U.S. District Court in Tyler, Texas, it said. A jury in that court last week found against Apple in another lawsuit by Smartfish (see 1502270013). The patents in question for Ericsson are related to 2G and 4G/LTE standards as well as design of semiconductor components, user interface software, location services and applications, as well as the iOS operating system, it said. Ericsson seeks exclusion orders in the ITC proceedings and damages and injunctions in the court actions. Apple also sued, asking U.S. District Court in San Francisco to find that it does not infringe on a small subset of Ericsson's patents, said the release. Apple didn't comment.
Congress needs to support the “Next Great Copyright Office,” Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars said in an op-ed for The Hill Thursday. “Step one in any review of the [Copyright] Act needs to focus on modernizing the Copyright Office itself.” All the witnesses and most House Judiciary Committee members at a hearing Thursday expressed support for CO modernization and independence (see 1502260057). Copyright experts told us last week that separating the CO from the Library of Congress has as much broad-based support as any issue in copyright (see 1502200040). “Copyright issues tend not to split across partisan lines, though there can be a so-called ‘copyright/copyleft’ split on certain substantive issues,” Aistars said. “The one area many seem to agree on regardless of their other views is that the Copyright Act has become progressively less comprehensible to ordinary people at the same time that copyright issues are becoming ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives,” she said. “All of these stakeholders require a modern, efficiently functioning Copyright Office with appropriate regulatory and adjudicatory powers,” but the CO “lacks administrative control over even its own budget and infrastructure needs,” Aistars said. “Because no agency exists with comprehensive, independent rulemaking authority in the copyright sphere, issues better suited for regulatory action continue to be resolved directly in the Act, or worse -- are ignored entirely.”
Congress needs to fix “copyright’s draconian, unpredictable civil penalties,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Wednesday. “High and unpredictable penalties can make relying on fair use a game of financial Russian roulette for artists and innovators.” EFF promoted Fair Use Week, which includes universities, Authors Alliance and the R Street Institute as participants. “Congress could help fix these problems by clarifying that statutory damages should never apply to a copyright user who relies on a fair use defense in good faith, even if the defense is unsuccessful,” EFF said.
Nearly 150 U.S. universities wrote Congress expressing concern over patent reform legislation. They said a large portion of the legislation goes “well beyond what is needed to address the bad actions of a small number of patent holders, and would instead make it more difficult and expensive for patent holders to defend their rights in good faith.” Mandatory fee-shifting and involuntary joinder are the most concerning because they would “make the legitimate defense of patent rights excessively risky and thus weaken the university technology transfer process,” the letter said. The patent system needs to provide strong protection for inventions to enable universities to license them to private sector enterprises, it said. Congress should take these concerns into consideration when assessing changes to the patent laws, it said. “It is imperative that any legislation avoid sweeping changes that would weaken our overall patent system and hinder the flow of groundbreaking advances from university research to the private sector, which catalyzes economic growth, creates jobs, and improves the lives of all Americans.” The letter was sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; and ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich. Among the signers were Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a white paper Monday outlining its vision to fix the U.S. patent system, said an EFF blog post. The 37-page white paper calls for six legislative “reforms,” including “ensuring there are inexpensive and efficient tools for challenging the validity of issued patents” and “passing a comprehensive patent reform bill, such as the Innovation Act” (HR-9) (see 1502120043). “The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is issuing far too many weak and overbroad patents, particularly on software," EFF staff attorney Vera Ranieri said in the blog post. "Instead of promoting innovation, these patents become hidden landmines for companies that bring new products to market."
The Society of European Stage Authors and Composers agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office’s recent music licensing study proposal that “sound recordings and musical works should be valued on a more consistent basis,” CEO John Josephson said in a news release Wednesday. The CO’s study, released Feb. 5, backed full federal protection of pre-1972 sound recordings and terrestrial broadcasters paying public performance royalties (see 1502050055). “We agree with the Copyright Office’s recognition of the need to assure fair compensation to creators, the necessity for the licensing process to be more efficient and the demand for market participants to have access to authoritative data to identify and license sound recordings and musical works,” Josephson said.
Columbia University's Technology Ventures patent program became the 16th licensor to join One-Blue, said the one-stop-shop Blu-ray patent pool in a Tuesday announcement. Other licensors in the pool are Cyberlink, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, JVCKenwood, LG, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Taiyo Yuden and Yamaha.
The U.S. and Japan joined the Hague system for the global registration of industrial designs, adding "two of the world’s biggest economies" to a registry “that supports creators worldwide,” the World Intellectual Property Organization said in an announcement Friday. According to statistics from WIPO, which runs the registry, 8.2 percent of all design applications worldwide in 2013 were filed by applicants from the U.S., and 4.7 percent by applicants in Japan, the agency said. WIPO hopes other countries will consider joining the Hague system now that the U.S. and Japan have, it said. WIPO touts the 64-country-strong Hague system as offering a cost-effective means of registering industrial designs in a large number of countries, “providing design owners broad geographical protection of their designs with a minimum of formality and expense.” A Hague registration “produces the same effect of a grant of protection in each of the designated contracting parties as if the design had been registered directly with each national office, unless protection is refused by the national office,” WIPO said.