News and Commentary
The first two of three hearings on the Tillis/Coons Section 101 reform were held last week. You can see the first hearing here, and the second here.
Numerous advocacy organizations, both for and against, have put out research and commentary on the 101 hearings. Read the Innovation Alliance’s letter here, and the Coalition Against Patent Abuse’s here.
In this long read for arsTECHNICA, Timothy Lee summarizes Judge Lucy Koh’s damning 233-page opinion ruling against Qualcomm in an FTC suit filed against the company for anticompetitive practices when it required all purchasers of its chips to buy patent licenses as well. It frequently used this stick to charge companies like Apple far more than the chips were worth, and used its patents to shut down rival chip manufacturers like Intel. You can read the full decision here.
The “original bitcoin paper,” written by Satoshi Nakamoto, after Craig Wright registered for the copyright, was taken down after the cryptocurrency site coindesk uploaded it. The site was able to upload it to Scribd again (described as “a musical production of the paper”), despite it also being infringing.
Allied Security Trust, a nonprofit with members like Google, Microsoft, and Uber, is ready to make another large patent buy for its members to prevent the companies from being sued for patent infringement claims.
New Research
A new report from the Journal of the American Medical Association finds high growth in the cost of brand-name prescription drugs. Among the 49 top-selling drugs, there was a 78% increase in median costs from 2012 to 2017.
The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to patent discoveries from federally funded research. This was expected to increase patenting activity and licensing, but a new paper finds that this was ineffective at increasing innovation in a way that would increase innovation. There are many causes to the slowdown identified in the paper, but one of the problems is the lack of knowledge transfer from universities to corporations in a way that can yield more innovation.
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