Thursday, September 07, 2006

Did the NY Appellate Division err in Kroll case?

So far only one reader commented on the IPBiz post on the Kroll case, and that reader was not a patent lawyer. He noted:

I will admit, $700 for a patent app in NYC sounded awful cheap to me.
Gee, even if it took only 10 hours, that is only $70/hour, which sounds
very very cheap for NYC attorney.

Maybe this $700 includes work outsourced to Greenwich Conn? Or Bhopal
India?

Gee, just think what a great quality patent app you get for $700.
There must be a lot of IP attorneys working in back alleys and upstairs from
bars, to afford that price in NYC.


The appellate division had written: in 1999 the average fee charged in the New York City area for preparation of the application was $700

For those of you who may have missed it, the May 2006 issue of Intellectual Property Today (pp. 34-36) had an article "Efficiently Preparing US Patent Applications" which placed the median time per application at 40 hours and the median billing rate at $300. Hmmm, 40 X $300 = ???? I don't think one can get an outsourced / offshored patent application for $700.

The reader also noted that the "single molecule" transistor is back:

University of Arizona physicists have discovered how to turn single molecules into working transistors. It's a breakthrough needed to make the next-generation of remarkably tiny, powerful computers that nanotechnologists dream of.

The simplest molecule they propose for a transistor is benzene, a ring-like molecule. They propose attaching two electrical leads to the ring to create two alternate paths through which current can flow.

[Hmmm, maybe the Proposition 71 folks want a piece of this action?]


Thinking back to Jan-Hendrik Schon (who fraudulently claimed a single molecule transistor), one observes that the same BBC show that financed a critical look into "bubble fusion" (see earlier IPBiz post), did a documentary on Schon.

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