Finding the Inventor (and Assignees)

The Obama Administration's goal of making certain owners involved in patent matters before the USPTO  provide the real party in interest was big talk in the patentsphere last week.     The organizations targeted by this new rule making effort are patent trolls.  The Silicon Valley crowd was jubilant.  Then the more gloomy patent guys checked in on all the problems with this approach.  


We thought it might be a good time to revisit the issue of fixing the current address data that is already on patents.  Making patent applicants provide high quality address data would also be helpful in finding the inventors and assignees especially if you think you might need a license.  So we posted an updated version of our Patent Archipelago article complete with a few examples of last week's address boo-boos from USPTO including the unannounced relocation of DuPont from Wilmington, DE to Wilmington, DC (Who knew.)  The Link-O-Matic will also take you to not one but two lists of valid Country codes used for patents.

Business Diplomacy

On another note, the most diplomatic new on the White House patent troll initiatives came from Barrons who reported it the new as follows:

The White House took executive actions to pursue licensing-fee lawsuite. Obama plans to seek legislation to sanction filers of suits that the courts deem "abusive."

Very diplomatic.

Some of the other notable sound bites can be found here.