Patent Law

Pitiable

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

Professors James Bessen and Michael J. Meuer (BM), who should be thoroughly discredited for their tripe, appear to have duped many people who should know better. What they demonstrate to the discerning is how little patent emperors have no clothes.

Hal Wegner, who wrote a facile paper on BM, nodding approval by absence of damnation, using it as a springboard for his pet patent reform preferences:

Meuer-Bessen is being taken quite seriously within mainstream industry and has already received the endorsement of prominent members of the academy.

Professor Dennis Crouch says that "[t]he analysis done in [Patent Failure] put[s] Bessen and Meurer at the forefront of leaders in economic analysis of patent laws." Patently O (March 13, 2008).

If judged by the current Congressional stalemate, an apparently complete lack of understanding exists within bio/pharma/chemistry as to the needs of essentially all other mainstream industries where litigation costs far outweigh patent profits as explained by Professors James Bessen and Michael J. Meuer.

Patent Failure provides an economic analysis based upon data supplied by some of the leading patent academics of the United States, including data shared by Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore. The back cover of the book contains the enthusiastic endorsement of Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford University.

Since Patent Failure represents the view of mainstream industry outside biotech, pharmaceuticals and chemistry, the perception manifested by Bessen-Meuer becomes the reality for the foundation for patent reform debates in the coming Congress.

The only Congressman with outspoken understanding of the situation is Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

The patent system is not for corporations. It is for inventors. The BM premise is fundamentally flawed.

The cost of litigation by infringing corporations does not justify decimating patent protection. Yet that is the lynchpin argument BM make.

Patent infringers voluntarily incur litigation cost to roll the dice on getting away with infringement, rather than take licenses. That fact is well known to anyone familiar with the patent litigation scene, and has been repeatedly chronicled in the Patent Prospector.

BM's figures are garbage, and their underlying presumptions wrong. For more content, read previous coverage in The Patent Prospector: March 24, 2008; March 13, 2008; March 20, 2008

BM do make a valid point, as Patent Hawk pointed out earlier today, about better demarcating patent claims:

The Federal Circuit needs to get serious about invalidating claims that are indefinite.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on May 11, 2008 (boomark / email).