Law and Innovation

Fresh and interesting article posted on Fortune about the top seven patent-earning tech companies in 2014.  Happy reading! "Patents are the lifeblood of the tech industry—and if last year’s numbers are any indication, that sector is performing with vigor.  More than 300,000  utility patents—those are the ones for inventions, rather than designs —were issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last year, a record high. Such patents allow companies to put their inventions on lockdown for up to two decades, reaping rewards for significant R&D investments. And there’s another incentive: allowing businesses to stock up their intellectual property warchests and fortify their legal defenses. “If you’re a bully you’re not going to pick on the big kids,” says Larry Cady, vice president of marketing and senior patent analyst at IFI Claims Patent Services, a firm that maintains a database of patents. “You’re going to pick on the pipsqueaks.” So which co...

Fresh and interesting article posted on TechCrunch about Pebble's fantastic smartwatch that is growing up very vast. It's not a secret anymore, the smartwatch industry and its key players are expanding. Some companies still have smartwatches in their development pipeline and many expect 2015 to be a big year for the technology. Whether or not customer adoption will follow this path as it did with smartphones, that's another story. I am currently working on an article concerning the intellectual property protection of graphical user interfaces for swartwatch that will be posted very soon.  Happy reading!  "Early this morning, we noted that the Pebble Time — Pebble’s new color e-ink smartwatch — had smashed through its $500,000 goal in an absolutely preposterous  seventeen minutes .   We don’t generally do play-by-play updates on Kickstarter campaigns, but this one is a bit too crazy not to note. The Pebble train just won’t stop. Nine hours after ...

Fresh and interesting article posted on Patently Mobile about Google's invention for a set-top box, a box-shaped device that converts the signals from a digital TV broadcast into a form which can be viewed on an analogue TV set, with an integrated wireless powering and/or charging station (commonly known as inductive charging). In other words, Google wants to eliminate the different cable for charging the batteries of the portable electronic devices. Happy reading! "(...)  Google's Patent Background Television is the prevalent global medium for entertainment and information despite the increase in use of smartphones and tablets throughout the past several years. A set-top box (STB) connects a television to an external source that provides a signal to the television. The STB usually contains a tuner for tuning the received signal and displaying the content (i.e., video, audio, internet web pages, interactive video gaming) on the television screen. The signal is ...

Fresh and interesting article posted on BI about why and how Apple is now an existential threat to Android. In Q4, Android still sold 206 million phones whereas Apple (only) sold 75 million. Nevertheless, it's the first time that Android has seen a quarter of sales declines. Happy reading!  "For the first time ever, sales of  Google's Android mobile devices have gone into decline  — an astonishing defeat for a product that is given away free to manufacturers. Google ought to be terrified at this news. Apple's iOS operating system for iPhone and iPad is trampling all over the Android world right now. This isn't just an incremental shift in market share. This is, if left unchecked, an existential turning point for Android and its developers and manufacturers. After all, if you can't win a battle against a product that costs about $700/£550 with a product that's equally good but free, then you're screwed. "Defeat" for Android is rel...

Fresh and interesting article posted on TechCrunch about the Report of the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten following the Court of Justice of the European Union’s ruling in Google Spain and Inc. vs. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja Gonzalez C131/12 (“the Ruling”) in May 2014.  It should be noted that this ruling doesn't establish a general "Right to be Forgotten" . As explained in the report, the implementation of the Ruling doesn't have the effect of “forgetting” information about a data subject. Instead, i t requires Google to remove links returned in search results based on an individual’s name when those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive”. Therefore, Google is not required to remove those results if there is an overriding public interest in them “for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life" (see report, p.3). Happ...