The Prior Art

Highlights from the May issue

The May issue of IP Law & Business is out. The cover story profiles 50 top IP people  under 45, and is available online. (free registration required)

More highlights from the May issue (subscribers only):

• Patent bar to E.D. Tex: enough is enough. AIPLA has filed a brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to force East Texas judges to transfer more cases out of the district. It's an effort to head off more heavy-handed venue reform that could come from Congress, but there are already early signs that the local judiciary is thinking of ways to keep the patent docket heavy even if they lose this case, which involves a product liability lawsuit against Volkswagen.

• Keyword-advertising showdown in Manhattan: Google brings in the big guns, hoping for a solid win at the 2nd Circuit to make it clear that selling trademarked keywords is perfectly legal, pro-consumer—and not so different than traditional advertising practices.

Patent Troll Tracker revealed to be a Cisco IP lawyer

The long-mysterious Troll Tracker revealed himself over the weekend, as Rick Frenkel, an IP executive at Cisco Systems and former litigator at Irell & Manella.

In his Saturday post, Frenkel said he was going public after someone threatened to reveal his identity.

More coverage: best story is from my newsroom colleague at the Recorder; the Wall Street Journal followed us here; both Frenkel's admission and Patently-O have comments aplenty.

Frenkel assumed it was someone out to collect Ray Niro’s bounty on him, originally reported in IPLB and later knocked up to $15,000, but Niro tells us the bounty remains uncollected.

Today Frenkel had no comment beyond his post. Cisco says nobody at the company knew about his double identity beyond Mallun Yen, Frenkel’s boss and the company’s VP of Intellectual Property. She was profiled by ALM in 2005.

Cisco, of course, is a big player in the Coalition for Patent Fairness; general counsel Mark Chandler continues to be front and center in the push for patent reform. Almost a year before he started his blog, Frenkel shared some of his thoughts on patent and patent trolls at a technology forum.

The patent-holding companies that Frenkel has been denouncing will no doubt cry foul, pointing out that the writer who declared he was “Just a lawyer, interested in patent cases, but not in publicity” was disingenuous, at least.

Frenkel’s revelation raises more interesting questions (for one, this journalist-turned-blogger doesn’t know how one person can write so much on top of a full time job). I enjoyed both communicating with the tracker's enemies and the mystery of the blog itself; with the mystery solved, the IP beat will be a little less fun.