Google's top patent lawyer notes the "disturbing trend" of lawyer-inventors

Michelle Lee, Google's head of patents and patent strategy, wrote a post on a company blog this week calling for a renewed effort at patent reform. In the post, Lee mentions the fact that non-practicing patent holding companies—which represent 90% of patent infringement allegations against her company—are very often controlled by patent lawyers, who sometimes take the next step and claim inventorship themselves. "The temptations and opportunities for abuse have gotten too high," writes Lee.

Consider this: Of the 20 patent lawsuits filed against Google since late 2007, all but two have been filed by plaintiffs who don’t make or sell any real product or service — in other words, by non-practicing entities or “patent trolls.” Most of these cases seem to feature the same small set of contingent fee plaintiff's lawyers asserting patent claims against the same small set of companies. We've also noticed a more disturbing trend: in many of these cases, the patents being asserted against us are owned by — and in a surprising number of cases, are even “invented” by — patent lawyers themselves.

She concludes by opining that chances for patent reform in 2009 look better than they did in the past Congress.

More this week on patent reform: Zusha Elinson writes about Silicon Valley gearing up for the patent reform debate. More coverage of early jockeying for position in the 2009 patent reform debate on Patently-O and 271 Patent Blog. 

Comments

[IDBIIP]

If lawyers are now inventors, does that mean that coders and engineers can now take over writing laws for the legislature to pass?

I'm thinking we need to finally get a proper source control system for our laws (none of this manually applying diffs crap), do a better job of gathering user requirements, create better documentation and a real framework for the design, add test cases, checks against reintroducing old bugs, and finally add an actual testing stage, rather than dumping every half-baked law straight into production immediately after passing it...