The opposition to the abuses by patent trolls is growing. The House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing today to further examine their litigation abuses.  Two of SIIA’s members, SAS and Adobe, join the panel in calling for changes to current law to remedy these abuses.  For instance, SAS’s General Counsel, John Boswell , says it is time to reverse the cost burden of excessive discovery requests in patent litigation. SIIA released a press statement today endorsing this approach and also supporting the SHIELD Act, which would move litigation costs to the patent troll when it loses its patent infringement case.

Adding to the chorus for change is an excellent summary of the factual issues by law professor Colleen Chien, posted today on Patentlyo, the nation’s leading legal blog.  Some of her surprising findings are that non-tech companies are now more often the target of suits by patent trolls (she calls them patent assertion entities or PAEs), and that most of the targets of PAEs (55%) are small companies making $10 million or less. The research shows among other things:

• PAEs brought 62% of 2012 patent litigations
• In 2012, PAEs sued more non-tech companies than tech companies
• 94% of PAE suits are brought by corporations
• 59% of all patent defendants are being sued by PAEs
• 55% of unique PAE defendants make $10M or less
• PAEs are less successful than practicing entities in litigation

She concludes her profile of patent trolls with concern about the impact that the trolls are having on “businesses, innovation and the economy.”  She also notes the level of anger among the victims, especially the small business victims, of patent trolls and predicts an increase in support for patent litigation reform: “As the numbers of impacted companies and industries continues to grow, don’t be surprised if the ranks of those who support curbing most egregious litigation abuses – the practices of going after end-users, rather than manufacturers and extracting from small companies nuisance-based rather than value-based settlements – continues to swell as well.”

SIIA agrees.  It is time to put an end to the litigation abuses by patent trolls.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

The benefits of big data analytics extend well beyond the uses by businesses and governments.  As the following examples illustrate, the version of data analytics known as text mining is an essential part of how the scholarly and scientific community does its research.

A well-known research finding, cited in the recent Hathitrust decision, illustrates the benefits of text mining in literary and historical research.  By comparing the frequency with which authors used “is” to refer to the United States rather than “are” researchers were able to conclude that it was only in the second half of the 19^th Century that we began to think of our nation as a single, indivisible entity.

A recent New York Times piece highlighted further examples of how big data analytics can be used to ferret out hidden patterns in literary works.  One study by Matthew Jockers found that Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scot had the greatest effect on other 19^th Century authors in terms of writing style and themes.  This conclusion was based on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900.  Professor Jockers also identified the dominant themes in The Last of the Mohicans and Moby Dick, and compared them with themes in all 10,000 novels published in the 19th century. He documents this  fascinating style of literary detective work in his forthcoming book Macroanalysis: Methods for Digital Literary History.

Now Professor Jockers and other researchers could have read all those works and used the subtle skills of traditional literary criticism to detect the commonalities among the authors.  But the volume of text material is simply too large for these traditional skills. As a practical matter, this kind of analysis would never happen without reliance on text mining.

Text mining is different from data mining in that it works with unstructured data.  Data mining can uncover interesting patterns in data bases where information is uniformly formatted.  It can be used, for example, to discover fraud patterns in credit card data, or detect what purchases typically go together (a flashlight and batteries, for example).  Text mining works with unstructured natural language text (which comprises about 80% of the data on the Internet) and extracts useful information and insights that can be used for a wide variety of purposes in business, government and university research. A further example of the use of this technique in the research context is the text mining of scientific journals that has allowed scientists to hypothesize causes of rare diseases by looking for indirect links in different subsets of the bioscience literature.

What are the implications for public policy?  One question is whether companies and researchers are getting access to text for legitimate analytical purposes. Are there roadblocks that need to be overcome? Some have suggested exceptions to copyright law in some cases to enable text and data mining. There was a hint of this idea in the European Commission’s recent announcement of its copyright reform initiative.

Market place participants –researchers, publishers, data aggregators and analytics companies – are well positioned to work out satisfactory arrangements to assure the flow of text to important analytical uses.  In principle, these voluntary arrangements should satisfy all parties and assure the discipline of market mechanisms in making sure that text is put to its best uses.  And the marketplace is well on its way toward allowing parties to reach satisfactory arrangements.  According to the U.K. Publishers Association, for example, over 90% of publishers already grant mining requests based on research across academic and professional publications and a third already allow any kind of mining of their content without restrictions.

Governments should not override these voluntary market mechanisms that seem to be working to provide the access to text information needed by researchers and other organizations.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

Yesterday President Obama signed into law a bill that would reauthorize the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to clamp down on cross-border fraud, providing greater assurances for US customers and business who want to shop, transact and earn a living on the Internet. The measure was spearheaded by Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), who is retiring. The bill, the U.S. Safe Web Act, allows the FTC to share information about cross-border online fraud with foreign law enforcement authorities and cooperate with them in tracking down and eliminating Internet scam artists.

At a time when many lament that partisan gridlock seems to prevent the enactment of good public policy, this bi-partisan reaffirmation of the FTC’s authority to go after cross-border crooks is a welcome sign that our policymaking institutions can still produce sensible policies that protect the public.

This law was first adopted in 2006 and has been an effective tool to combat cross-border spam, spyware and fraud. Fraudsters do not recognize national borders, and law enforcement efforts must be similarly global. Effective international cooperation on law enforcement investigations is crucial for providing consumers and businesses with the trust and confidence with each other online.
Hugh Stevenson, Deputy Director for International Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, has been leading FTC efforts to use the authority in this law to combat Internet scams, fraudulent telemarketing, spam, spyware, and other cross-border misconduct that harms US consumers. In his testimony in front of the Energy and Commerce Committee in July, he made it clear that reauthorization was needed to allow the FTC “to continue its current cross-border enforcement efforts and deal with new threats to U.S. consumers emanating from a growing number of jurisdictions.”

The Congress agreed and the legislation received bi-partisan support all the way through the process. The House approved the measure by voice vote on September 11 and the Senate followed suit and passed the measure on November 14. The President signed it on December 4.