How Standardizing Assignee Names help us deliver Best Results?

Incomplete data is as useless as no data. Especially true in the case of the patent services industry, insights generated from data can prove both useless and absolutely worthless if the data on the basis of which insights were built was incomplete or deficient. To give you an instance, let us consider that automaker Toyota […]
How to Select A Better Search Partner?

“Tis’ the era of outsourcing!” And there’s nothing particularly wrong with it. This is especially true for In-house counsels and Patent Attorneys who are trying to find prior art to save their clients’ royalty dollars in litigation. An amazing strategy, finding prior art for a patent being infringed, despite ingenuity, can get quite onerous and […]
How Technology Life Cycle helps in Patent Portfolio Maintenance?

Imagine the world where you’d be clicking pictures on your Kodak DSLR and uploading them on Instagram with hashtag #KodakMoment while checking comments on the post on your revolutionary Blackberry. The foldable Nokia Smartphone that you wore on your wrist is still your backup phone because Nokia phones never run out of batteries. The above […]
How Patents Impact Share Prices of Companies?

When it comes to valuation of a company, the market seems to react promptly to product releases, but intangible assets seem to be hardly relevant to investors. This is happening even though there are multiple empirical studies in existence, suggesting a strong positive correlation between high stock prices and innovation – R&D and Patent data. […]
FTO Inspired Landscapes – A Way to Optimize Freedom to Operate Studies

Ask a bunch of patent counsel how do they feel about performing a Freedom to Operate study, and you may hear a collective groan from the whole group. No doubt – performing an FTO is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. And yet, the importance of ‘freedom to operate’ or ‘clearance’ search during the development phase […]
How we use 3G and GSM concepts to invalidate 4G LTE Patents?

Of late, we have been performing a lot of invalidation searches on patents of 4G LTE. And I noticed a weird pattern – call it insight if you would like to – that I didn’t discover earlier while working on patents of 4G. The technique that I used in this patent prior art search for […]
7 Post-Alice patent cases that survived 101 rejections – Clearing some cloud of doubts on software patent eligibility

By the time the Alice decision marked its second anniversary, more than 8400 applications got abandoned while 60,000+ applications got rejected due to the decision. The district court decisions clocked around 247 – invalidating 70% of them – and Federal Circuit at 40 – invalidating 95% of the patents under 35 USC 101. “No U.S. Supreme […]
USD720916 – The Beginning of a Probably Long Countersue battle between McCain and Simplot

Recently, McCain filed a complaint in the court of Northen district of Illinois alleging that J.R. Simplot used its patented designs USD720916 in its Sidewinders product(as shown below). You might think- “Yet another infringement suit, eh!” Not as ordinary as being assumed, what makes this case especially interesting is that the complaint filed by McCain […]
How To Get High Quality Patent Applications Under Fixed Budget?

Back in the early 1980’s, I used to watch the BBC show “Danger UXB”. For the uninitiated, Danger UXB chronicled the post-war exploits of a British bomb disposal unit called to defuse and remove unexploded aerial bombs dropped by the Germans on London during the Blitz of World War Two. Unexploded bombs are still being […]
Patent Monitoring Services: Where do current reports lack and how to fix them?

While much has been said about the need for a regular Competitor Patent Monitoring exercise in every major industry, the importance of the patent monitoring process in the Pharmaceutical industry cannot be stressed enough. Most pharma companies have well set up in-house patent watch processes or an outsourced patent monitoring service. These processes usually give end-user […]
BlackBerry Vs. Nokia – Why we believe US8861433 can be invalidated?

I am very fond of Nokia and its products. Mostly because I feel they have greatly contributed to developing various 3GPP standards. So when I found out that Blackberry was suing Nokia (Source) and that too for a 3GPP related invention, I was intrigued. To quench my curiosity, I took a deep dive into the […]
Are You Throwing Away Your Million Dollar Patents?

Are you unknowingly throwing away your company’s best patents to save some bucks on maintenance fees? Or did your company decide not to pay the maintenance fee due to a lack of potential licensees? Well, this is not a common phenomenon. Major tech giants, including the likes of IBM, Samsung, and Apple, spend millions of […]
Smart Patent Prosecution – How Patent Examiner Analytics can help save time and money?

Having a sound prosecution strategy is as exigent to the growth of a portfolio as is the necessity of a sound patent strategy for the development of a business. And like every business has its own version of patent strategy; prosecution strategies used by counsel can vary based on the situation. The question remains — Which […]
NEO – How This One Tool Helps Find Better Prior Art?

Race of finding better prior art that can influence an IPR or patent litigation is the need of the hour. Such searches have become increasingly important in recent times, given the huge increase in the number of litigations and IPRs filed with every passing day. However, locating a bang-on prior-art is not a piece of […]
The Cloud Communication Platform Giant Twilio’s Patent US8738051 Can Get Invalidated

Less than a month ago, Twilio Inc. filed a suit against Telesign Corporation for willful patent infringement. According to the complaint by Twilio, Telesign was a previous customer, and its co-founder and vice-president of product strategy Stacy Stubblefield had a private Twilio account. Twilio accused that Telesign’s engineers learned of the technology and API used by […]
Five Indicators that Can Help IP Counsels do Better in Prosecutions

Someone not so famous once said — If something helps you get better, leverage it. The “it” varies from person to person, based on needs and priorities. One such “it” could be insights derived from the data for IP counsel. Yes, you read that right. Insights from data can help you get better at what […]