It’s DNC time in Denver and all kinds of weird advertisements are popping up all over the place, including the airport.  My partner Jason sent me a photo of this one today with the heading "Puke". I put this in the "you’ve got to be fucking kidding me" category.  Let’s break it down.  Here are […]

Microsoft is trying to.  It’s up on PeerToPatent and you can comment on this patent application (and the USPTO will presumably listen to you) if you’d like to help keep the world free of really silly software patents.  Following is the abstract. "A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is […]

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled Tech Giants Join Together To Head Off Patent Suits.  It describes the efforts of a new organization named Allied Security Trust who’s goal is to "buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them."  The named companies […]

Josh Kopleman at First Round Capital has an excellent post up titled Depending on pending…  I’m going  out to lunch at the Rio today and having a margarita to celebrate the issuance of the original Half.com patent (#7,373,317) that was just issued.  8.5 years after Josh filed for it.  And 7 years after eBay acquired […]

When I read the NY Times Article In One Flaw, Questions on Validity of 46 Judges my immediate response was to break out laughing.  Then I said – out loud – "no fucking way."  Then I laughed some more. John Duffy, a law professor at George Washington University Law School just might be my new […]

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people communicate with each other.  As an active user of all computer based communication technologies such as email, IM, web collaboration, and twitter, I realize that direct, bite size communication is often effective.  However, given the lack of persistence of data […]

The CDN patent battle is about to heat up in a major way.  GigaOm has a guest column by Dan Rayburn titled Level 3 Adds IBM’s CDN Patents to Its Portfolio.  If you believe in the defense use of patents, this is a brilliant maneuver.  If you believe in the offensive use of patents, this […]

My partners and I were hanging out at lunch last week when Jason brought up the question of whether or not we could patent the business method of “creating or acquiring intellectual property for the primary objection of bring lawsuits against potential infringers.”  In essence, could we patent the idea of being a patent troll?  […]

Frank Gruber (Somewhat Frank) has a nice summary of the 5 Startups (that) Demo At Tech Cocktail Boulder.  200+ people at The Foundry (across from our office at Foundry Group.)  I was in Berkeley having dinner at Adagia Restaurant talking about patents.  Oh well, the tradeoffs one makes in pursuit of the truth.