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Purposeful ignorance?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

A BusinessWeek article on "patent troll tracker" Rick Frenkel of Cisco titled Busting a Rogue Blogger contains the text:

Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler even cited the blog as a good independent source of information while in Washington lobbying for changes to patent law that would rein in trolls, unaware he was plugging the work of a Cisco employee.

Believable? Refer to the IPBiz post
Pinocchios for intellectual property professors?.

Recall that Frenkel wrote: nor was anyone up the chain above my direct manager aware that I was the author which would imply his direct manager was aware of his blogging activities.

The BusinessWeek article by Michael Orey did not mention the article The Cowardice of Anonymous Bloggers.

On the Ozymandian nature of blogs, IPBiz notes that sitemeter wasn't counting "hits" to IPBiz between about 7:15 and 11:00 this morning (29 March 08). Earlier they had failed to count for over 24 hours, and, when queried, sort of shrugged. It is after all, only a blog. [Update: nothing from sitemeter from 7am through 12 noon on March 30. Sitemeter doesn't work anymore.]

See also

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/02/patent-troll-tracker-is-ciscos-rick.html

In passing, IPBiz had forwarded the
IPFrontline link on Bessen/Meurer to Professor Heald at University of Georgia. No response. [Note that Chandler, Frenkel's boss, was at Heald's symposium on Bessen/Meurer.]

One reader made the following observation on Bessen/Meurer:

Its humorous to me that the academics find any standing to say that patents are ?empirically? more trouble than they are worth ? I guess that makes the thousands of companies who oppose the current patent reform legislation and want to maintain a strong patent regime ignorant managers of their own corporate assets. Classic ivory tower idiocy.

Full post as published by IPBiz on March 30, 2008 (boomark / email).