Hee-Eun Kim, an associate with Covington & Burling LLP, where I work as Of Counsel, has prepared a very useful survey of the last developments involving non-practicing entities (NPEs), more widely known as “patent trolls, in Europe. Paul Belleflamme has addressed the trolling problems in several posts: Beware! Privateers patrol thse patent waters, What to […]
Tag Archives | troll
Will ‘Patent trolls’ soon appear on the European market?
By 18 November 2013 101
It is under this title that a series of articles (published in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique on October, 19 2013 and prepared by Laurent Lambrecht; see here) wondered if the future unitary patent and unified patent court might attract “trolls” in Europe. “The risk is not negligible“: this is my answer, summarized in the […]
Beware! Privateers patrol these patent waters.
By 3 June 2013 24
In 1572, Queen Elizabeth I of England commissioned Francis Drake to sail for America and encouraged him to plunder Spanish vessels on his way. Drake had thus all the attributes of a pirate, except that he was not working for his own account but for a government. This type of pirate was known as a […]
What to think of ‘patent trolls’? The return
By 31 October 2011 76
In a previous post last year, I was presenting different views on so-called patent trolls, which are sometimes defined as “companies that do not invent anything but instead purchase patents and use them to sue big companies with deep pockets” (paidcontent.org). This negative view of patent trolls is widely shared nowadays and has prompted President Obama and the […]
What to think of ‘patent trolls’?
By 11 November 2010 0
Early october this year, Apple was condemned by a US court to pay $625.5 million damages to a small company, Mirror Worlds LLC, for infringing three patents related to how files are displayed on several Apple’s products (iPhone, iPod and Macbooks). Apple is currently challenging this verdict (see here for more). A question that has […]