Big Banks and Business Method Patents
The banking industry and the patent system are longstanding American institutions whose histories date back to the founding of this country. Historically, however, the paths of these two institutions rarely crossed. Although financial firms have been increasing their innovative output for decades now, until recently they relied on trade secrecy, first mover advantages, and other business mechanisms to protect and monetize their intellectual property — not patents. Through a convergence of circumstances over the past several years, that pattern has changed. The shift began when the Federal Circuit decided that business methods — banks’ primary mode of innovation — are patentable subject matter. That decision triggered an increase in the number of business method patents issued by the PTO, and, correspondingly, a surge in patent infringement litigation targeting big banks. When the banks found little success in court, their powerful lobby persuaded Congress to include a special carve out for financial patents in the America Invents Act — the comprehensive patent reform legislation enacted in 2011. Meanwhile, as the financial industry sought legislative favor to ward off future infringement suits, many of the big banks built substantial patent portfolios of their own. This Article explores this nascent relationship and considers some potential implications of growing bank involvement in our patent system. It suggests that the intersection of these institutions could yield some benefit, for example by improving the publicly available information regarding financial innovations. Yet, more pointedly, it warns of possible harms, especially if big banks use their political and economic power to disproportionately influence patent reform and innovation policy in the future.
Paving the Path to Accurately Predicting Legal Outcomes: A Comment on Professor Chien’s Predicting Patent Litigation
Professor Colleen Chien recently developed an innovative and important model that relies on a patent's "after-acquired" characteristics to predict the chances that the patent will be involved in litigation. This comment critiques Professor Chien's model by identifying certain weaknesses, including that its dataset is limited to 1990 patents and its sample size may be too small to be sufficiently representative, as well as a number of endogeneity concerns. Additionally, we seek a more precise definition of data regarding the patent owner, further categorization of reexamination data, and research into the timing of transfer. Finally, we question her policy recommendations given these weaknesses and propose areas of further inquiry.
PRECISION FARMING APPROACHES TO SMALL-FARM AGRICULTRUE
Precision farming implies a management strategy to increase productivity and economic returns with a reduced impact on the environment. It is based on the application of information technology to a description of variability in the field, variable-rate operations and the decisionmaking system. There are three technology levels and three strategies in the development of precision farming. Precision farming practices can be used on small farms as well as big ones, and they play a core role in rural development programs which are integrated with industry. A real-time soil spectrophotometer was developed to describe soil variability in farmers' fields, to be used in precision farming.