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Halliburton: Patenting Patent Trolling to Block Patent Trolls

By Dan Slater Myhvold, perhaps the most written-about Law Blog subject who doesn't own a law degree, is the former chief technology officer for Microsoft who's quietly amassed a trove of 20,000-plus patents and patent applications. His firm, Intellectual Ventures, is using its clout to press tech giants into costly patent-licensing deals -- making it, in other words, one of the world's largest patent trolls. Now, the Patently-O blog tells us that, in 2007, Halliburton filed for patent protection claiming a method of "patent acquisition and assertion by a (non-inventor) first party against a second party." Patently-O writes: "It looks like the company wants to be able to sue non-inventing entities who try to patent and assert technology against a company who has been using the technology as a trade secret." To continue reading the rest of this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog, click here.

Full post as published by The Trade Secrets Vault on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).