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A patent-licensing entity that sued the five largest cell phone carriers has seen its biggest victory slip away.

On July 25, 2017, the Patent Office issued a patent to HP on reminder messages. Someone needs to remind the Patent Office to look at the real world before issuing patents.

It's a problem everyone has had: you're watching a movie and don't catch a key bit of dialogue. In September 2015, Apple unveiled a new feature for Apple TV that solves the problem. Users can ask "what did she say?" and Siri will skip back 15 seconds and temporarily enable captions.

The top US patent court has been asked to consider an urgent appeal from a manufacturer of supercomputers that's desperate to escape an upcoming trial in the patent hotspot of East Texas.

The Eastern District of Texas has become known as a haven for the type of litigation shops sometimes derided as "patent trolls," but the district's strict discovery rules and tendency to favor jury trials has attracted operating companies seeking to enforce their patents, as well.

Boiled down, an IPR petition is a request for the US Patent and Trademark Office to reconsider whether it should have granted a certain patent in the first place. If the USPTO takes up an IPR petition, the result is a kind of "litigation-light," with briefing by lawyers and a short trial-like procedure at the USPTO. The IPR process was created by the 2011 America Invents Act, and the reviews got underway in 2012.

IPRs follow a process that is substantially faster, and a whole lot cheaper, than trying to invalidate a patent in district court.

Uniloc, one of the nation's most well-known patent-holding companies, sued Google earlier this year in the Eastern District of Texas. Even though neither Uniloc nor Google has meaningful ties to that area, the lawsuit was no surprise—East Texas has long been the most popular venue for patent-holding companies to file lawsuits.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Impression Products v. Lexmark International was a big win for individuals’ right to repair and modify the products they own. While we’re delighted by this decision, we expect manufacturers to attempt other methods of controlling the market for resale and repair. That’s one reason we’re giving this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month award to Ford’s patent on a vehicle windshield design.

The US Supreme Court voted 7-1 to place more limits on the rights of patent-holders, striking down a decision by the nation's top patent court for the second time in two weeks.

In a unanimous decision, the justices held that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles all patent appeals, has been using the wrong standard to decide where a patent lawsuit can be brought. Today's Supreme Court ruling in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods enforces a more strict standard for where cases can be filed. It overturns a looser rule that the Federal Circuit has used since 1990.

Paying for a ride to get around town isn't new. The first gas-powered taxicabs date to the beginning of the 20th century, and the horse-drawn "hackney coaches" of London date to the 17th century. In the vehicle-for-hire business, it's all about efficiency and execution, not "invention." That long history notwithstanding, the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted patents that claim monopoly rights to, essentially, calling up a taxi—on a computer.

The bill is enthusiastically backed by big copyright holders, including the Copyright Alliance, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Software & Information Industry Association. It's opposed by public interest groups and trade groups that advocate for a more balanced copyright system, including Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Re:Create coalition.

Cellular Communications Equipment, LLC, a unit of Acacia, has sued Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The company says that the five industry giants infringe four patents related to basic cell phone technologies. All four patents originated at Nokia, which has been sharing its patents in so-called "patent privateering" arrangements for some years now.

Every year around April 26th, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) hosts a weird dog and pony show of copyright/patent/trademark maximalism that it calls World IP Day. In the past, we've pointed out that the events and festivities are disturbingly one-sided and frequently clueless.

In 2013, the US Patent and Trademark Office's reexamination unit rejected all claims of Apple's '915 patent. A patent appeal board upheld the cancelation, leaving Apple to turn to the Federal Circuit, which has ultimate jurisdiction. On Friday, a panel of Federal Circuit judges sided with the patent office on some of the claims, but revived three others.

Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops, Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME next year. Canonical is also ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, spelling doom for the goal of creating a converged experience with phones acting as desktops when docked with the right equipment.

A broad array of Android phones are vulnerable to attacks that use booby-trapped Wi-Fi signals to achieve full device takeover, a researcher has demonstrated. The vulnerability resides in a widely used Wi-Fi chipset manufactured by Broadcom and used in both iOS and Android devices. Apple patched the vulnerability with Monday's release of iOS 10.3.1. "An attacker within range may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip," Apple's accompanying advisory warned. In a highly detailed blog post published Tuesday, the Google Project Zero researcher who discovered the flaw said it allowed the execution of malicious code on a fully updated 6P "by Wi-Fi proximity alone, requiring no user interaction."

So if there's one thing we've probably repeated more than others around here, it's the idea that in the IoT and copyright maximalist era, you no longer truly own the things you think you own. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about video game consoles, software, smart home hubs, ebooks, DVDs or routers -- in the always-connected, copyright mad, instantly-upgradeable firmware age, companies are often quick to remove some or all functionality at a whim, leaving you with little more than a receipt and a dream of dumb technology days gone by.

Our ongoing Reclaim Invention campaign urges universities not to sell patents to trolls. This month's stupid patent provides a good example of why. US Patent No. 8,473,532 (the '532 patent), "Method and apparatus for automatic organization for computer files," began its life with publicly-funded Louisiana Tech University. But in September last year, it was sold to a patent troll. A flurry of lawsuits quickly followed.

It was John Deere's decision to implement a draconian lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" that has magically turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists. A lengthy EULA the company required customers to sign last October forbids the lion-share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned, simultaneously banning these consumers from suing over "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software."

The operator of a website that accepts subscriber logins only over unencrypted HTTP pages has taken to Mozilla's Bugzilla bug-reporting service to complain that the Firefox browser is warning that the page isn't suitable for the transmission of passwords.

"Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International, is not wanted and was put there without our permission, Please remove it immediately. We have our own security system, and it has never been breached in more than 15 years. Your notice is causing concern by our subscribers and is detrimental to our business."