By Cade Metz in Palo
Alto for The
Register. This story was reproduced with
permission.
"The Patent Office is overburdened," she said. "The volume of
patents going in is huge. And the quality of patents coming out -
it could be better."
There are too many businesses, she added, who do little more
than use patents as a means of making money. Such businesses, often
referred to as
trolls in patent law, have proved to be a serious minefield for
tech companies over the last few years. Lee highlighted the
tribulations of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry
handheld, which settled a patent lawsuit for $612m last May.
Speaking alongside Lee, Apple's chief patent counsel, Chip
Lutton, wouldn't go quite so far as his Google counterpart. He said
the US patent system was "not broken" and that it was "not in
crisis," calling it "the best in the world". But he acknowledged
that there was a "huge bubble" of patent assertions that needs to
be scaled back. "The question with this bubble market, as with any
bubble market, is 'Can we solve it without a crisis arising?'" he
said.
Lutton believes that the key to fixing the country's patent
problems lies with the courts, not the patent office. "Most patents
issued are never litigated and never licensed," he said. "We need
to focus on fixing the litigation system. That's most
relevant."
Lutton's attitude was mirrored by that of fellow speaker David
Kappos, vice president and assistant general counsel for
intellectual property law at IBM, the company that has led the
country in patent filling for the last 14 years.
Perhaps Google is still learning how to play the patent game as
well as seasoned veterans like Apple and IBM. When asked if the
company's own struggles with the patent system where mostly the
result of an increase in the number software patents issued or the
rise in Google's popularity, Lee picked popularity. "When you
become successful," she said, "all of a sudden everyone wants a
piece of it."
© The Register
2007
