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WSJ on Troll Tracker Frenkel

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Stuart Weinburg discussed the unmasking of the patent troll tracker as Cisco's Rick Frenkel, including issues of corporate permission/corporate sponsorship.

Cisco spokesman John Noh said the blog represented the personal opinions and personal research of Mr. Frenkel and that Cisco didn't fund, edit or maintain it in any way.

"Many Cisco employees maintain personal blogs and their opinions do not necessarily represent that of Cisco's, and as long as those blogs do not violate our code of business conduct, Cisco does not interfere with their expression of free speech whatsoever," Mr. Noh said.

Mr. Noh said for now, it is up to Mr. Frenkel to decide if he wants to maintain the blog.

IPBiz notes that one can find different corporate viewpoints on employee blogs merely by viewing IPBiz.

Separately, of anonymity:

Joe Miller, professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., said he can appreciate why Mr. Frenkel might have wanted to maintain his anonymity. "I would appreciate why someone would conclude why people would not give the facts a fair hearing if they knew the facts are from a particular company," he said.

However, Mr. Miller added that anonymity also has a dark side, as it allows people to say scurrilous, baseless and offensive things about people without being held accountable.

Another dark side of patent reform is the lemming like behavior of certain intellectual property professors on patent reform, in which they adopt certain positions BECAUSE OF expressed positions of (identified) other people.

NetworkWorld notes: Cisco itself is very vocal in its fight for patent reform of what it describes as the "abuses" of the current patent system. According to a statement about patent reform on its Web site, Cisco states: "The patent litigation system today is unbalanced and patent speculators are exploiting the system's unfairness to coerce high settlements from productive companies. The patent litigation rules function less and less as a neutral system for resolving disputes, and instead encourage winner-take-all, jackpot-like strategies. These lawsuits rob our economy of billions of dollars that would otherwise be invested in jobs, innovation, consumer savings and shareholder value."

See also

Patent Troll Tracker is Cisco's Rick Frenkel

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 26, 2008 (boomark / email).