Thursday, August 26, 2010

"Fantastic paper" with nothing new?

Mike Masnick at TechDirt starts out: Michael Scott points us to a fantastic draft paper by respected intellectual property lawyer/scholar Mark Lemley recapping the long history of content industries declaring that the sky is falling every time a new technology hits the scene.

But the second paragraph begins: There isn't necessarily anything new in the paper. Many of you probably know all of these stories, and they've been discussed at length over the years in posts and comments here on Techdirt.

Thus, in summary, the Lemley paper is "fantastic" because it agrees with Masnick, who already discussed the points before. The draft paper can't be very inventive if there is all this anticipatory prior art.

As to the "respected" part, from comments on Patently-O in August 2007:

Come on, according to the esteemed preeminent patent scholar Mark Lemley..."The idea that this would be any sort of significant restriction on patent owners is ludicrous to me. It will affect 10 applications a year, maybe 50, out of 450,000." And thanks Patent Prospector for pointing out once again that Professor Lemley is a fool or a tool...heck, he's both. http://www.patenthawk.com/blog/

Posted by: metoo | Aug 23, 2007 at 11:32 PM

Has this guy Lemley written/prosecuted any applications? His statement is pure bullshi*t! In the technological field I work in, which is not arcane in any respects, 35-40 claims at the time of filing would be common to capture all prospective commercial embodiments. Some of these pan out, some don't. But in this business you are damned if you do and especially damned if you don't. This claim number limitation has many liability issues attached!

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