« First to Invent | Main | Spanish Inquisition »
February 2, 2006
PubPat Clogs the Patent Office
In what promises to be another public flogging, the patent office is going to reexamine Forgent Network's JPEG patent (4,698,672), which has less than a year of life left in it, and has yielded over a $105 million in licenses from over 40 companies, with another 44 currently on the docket for infringement, all of whom have had a chance to douse the patent with invalidity assertion before the courts. Officious PubPat, which specializes in rubbing patents' noses in reexam, instigated, and the patent office, feeling the need nowadays to be ever so politically correct, bit.
In semi-related news, JASC Software (now owned by Corel), makers of the wonderful PaintShop Pro graphics program, just signed a license for the patent.
USPTO statistics show that reexam is nasty medicine, resulting in changes to claims or outright revocation 70% of the time.
Here's Patent Prospector previous coverage on PubPat gunning at the JPEG patent.
Posted by Patent Hawk at February 2, 2006 6:09 PM | Prosecution