Hello everybody, I can't believe this would be my last post for this class! For my last post, I would like to talk about what I learned in this class. I learned a lot of things about patent: what it is, what types there are, how it is filed, how long it takes to be filed, the patent trolls, patent wars, and progressing patent reform policies. Yet, as I learned a lot of things about patents, I realized the importance of patent and questioned myself "why patent?" Patents are inventions, part of Intellectual Property, which is a legal way to protect all the creations of human mind. All the things we learned in the class has to be linked back to the origin of patent. As there are patents, inventions are protected and cannot be commercially made, used, distributed, or sold without the consent of the creator or patentee. First, patents provide incentives to the individuals, in particular, the creators receive financial reward and recognition for their creativity. Second, the quality of human life can be enhanced through new creations. Third, there can occur technological development through protection that stimulates research. Fourth, it enables the inventors to recoup their investment for the money and time spent developing the ideas. Finally, the use of patent documents enables future researchers not to re-invent the creations. As stated, I really learned a lot about patents through this course, but what I want to emphasize the most is the importance of patents. Once we fully understand the presence of patents, we can easily learn and apply the knowledge we learned in this class.
Hello everyone, Today I would like to focus on what I learned in this class and how I am going to use it and apply on my future field. From the beginning of this course, I had zero knowledge about patents, how it is actually filed out, the types of patents, the fact that there are so many patent wars between big companies, and how some of the people seek for economic opportunities and act as patent trolls.
Currently being a freshman, I am not 100% sure of what I would do for my career, but I believe that what I learned in this class can help my future field. Not only I could apply the knowledge I learned from this class on my future career, but so I could apply to my everyday life. What I didn't understand before taking class, I would now understand the words used to relate patents on the news and understand the current issue. Before taking this class I never fully understood the patent wars major companies were having (between Apple and Samsung, or even in broader way of all major companies suing each other for infringing patents). I only understood why they were suing each other (because of patents they filed and whomever infringed it, they sued against). Yet, I did not understand how complicated and ongoing in was in current time. After fully understanding the complications of patent system, it definitely is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive to file a patent, sue a company for infringement, and win the patent war.
Hello all, I just want to add on more on what I wrote for my previous post. Since I wrote about what I really liked and disliked about the usage of social media, I want to elaborate on how I would recommend other professors to teach in this way and how we can further improve this way of learning. I personally find using all social media in class very interesting, unique, and efficient. However, I think it is pretty hard for big classes that focus on large field of subject hard to use only social medias to teach the course. For instance, it was productive and efficient for this class to use social media to learn about patents because we always had specific topic about patent (whether obviousness, novelty, paten trolls, etc). However, class that deals with subject that has huge field, such as, Intro to Economics, Intro to Psychology, Computer Science, math, etc would be hard to use social media collaboratively.
Yet, I think classes that deal with media, such as, media studies, film, or art could efficiently use social media to teach and learn the class because social media is something they should be familiar with. When we say that the class is appropriate enough to use social media collaboratively, I would recommend the instructor or professor to use not more than 2 or 3 social media because if it goes over three social media, then it becomes hard to handle and manage all of them. I think it is very productive and efficient to only focus on certain media and use it consistently (like we did in class) to ensure everyone is getting used to the same source.
Hello all, I can't believe this week's post would be my last post for this class and spring semester is already ending. I just really want to thank Professor Lavian before starting my last post and appreciate all the lectures, assignments, and special guest speakers he had arranged for us! I would like to focus specifically on the methods IEOR 190G course efficiently used, which is collaborative social media. We initially used blog and Youtube, then even tried Twitter. In the first few weeks of class, we used only blog and Youtube, which I was very positive about. I was excited with the fact that we are using blogs because I have never tried blog postings and just the fact that we commented on each other's blog posts really helped everyone to learn from each other. In fact, from viewing other blogs and commenting on them, I learned different perspectives on single topic or learned different topics on single angle. Often times, for free research on broad topic, it was very interesting to see what others found that was completely different from us. For instance, one of the homework I liked the most was looking for most ridiculous patents. Not only I enjoyed searching for silliest patents, but also I had fun watching other people's patents and their comments and thoughts about it. After few weeks of working with blogs and Youtube channels, we used Twitters to briefly talk any issues about patents. At first, I was pretty doubtful about using Twitter because I have never used Twitter in my life and I thought there were simply too many social medias we were using. I thought it was too complicated to handle posts and comments on blogs and YouTubes, and additional work on another social media was just too much. Yet, after using the Twitter, I found another advantage, which was not way different from Youtube and blog. By quickly tweeting about patents, it was easy and simple to talk about patents in one second, and it was also easy to just repost some of the tweets I personally liked on my classmate's twitter.
Hello all, Since I focused on the field of fashions from Johanna Blakely's lecture, "Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture" on last week's post, I would like to make connection to intellectual property protection with fashion industries. The fashion industry in the States generates more than $300 billion in revenue each year. Although there are many economic and artistic contributions of fashion, there are very limited legal protections for fashion design in United States. Although trends change quickly, it is so easy to disseminate latest designs and make counterfeits. Due to this, it is challenging for designers to achieve a fair financial return of their creative artworks. The fashion industry, of course, has requested Congress to modernize and reform US law and allow for more reasonable and greater protection of designs. This would bring the US up to the sam standard as other countries, such as, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, where fashion designs are protectable. Only the elements of a design are protectable currently in the United States. Trade dress, copyright and design patents are the three theories of intellectual property available to protect fashion industries.
As I have talked about patent wars for a subject we discussed in lecture, I wanted to research more about it and discuss in depth for this blog post. Lawsuits are rocking the smartphone industry as almost every big manufacturer fights to get money from their competitors for using its patents, to block competitors' products from being imported to US.
If we think of this continuous smartphone patent wars in long term, this could mean fewer smartphones, devices eliminating features, or a general slowdown of innovation in the future. Judge Theodore Essex of the International Trade Commission, who rules on smartphone patent cases, agreed the "prospects for peace soon are bleak. The best possible outcome is mutually assured destruction, if the various smartphone players each assemble enough critical patents that they become unwilling to sue each other." However, not all patents are useful as weapons of war. Those essential to wireless standards are usually held where they are required to be licensed on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms.
Hello everyone, Since I explained about intellectual property protection as what we have learned in class,I would like to talk about mobile patent wars as another subject we learned from Professor Efrat Kasznik's lecture.
The smart phone wars or smartphone patents licnesing is an ongoing intense business battle that includes smartphone manufactures, such as, Sony, Google, Apple Inc., Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Xiaomi, and HTC. The "smart phone wars" is literally having a conflict over the patents between multinational technology and software corporations. Comapnise have granted a patent that can sue other companies to prevent them from using the moethods the patent covers to increase their market share. Due to this, the number of lawsuits, counter-suits, and trade complaints based on patents and designs has increased significantly. Here is the timeline that I picked to show major events, initial suits, counter-suits, rulings, license agreements from 2009 to 2013. 2009 October 22: Nokia sues Apple over 10 patents December 11: Apple countersues Nokia over 12 pantest December 29: Nokia files a second lawsuit 2010 January 15: Apple files against Nokia over 9 patents March 2: Apple sues HTC over 10 pantest April 27: HTC signs an agreement with Microsoft to license Microsoft patents 2011 January 25: Microsoft counterclaims against Motorola, asserting 2 patents June 22: apple countersues Samsung in South Korea over an unknown number of patents July 1: ITC rules that APple infringes on 2 patents held by S3 Graphics 2012 June 1: Samsung files an appeal aginst APple's injucton against the Galaxy Nexus July 2: Nokia clams that the Nexus 7 infringes on its patents July 4: A high court in the UK rules that three of the four patents Apple brought up against HTC are invalid 2013 June: ITC rules iPads infringe on Samsung patents August: ITC ruling from June vetoed , ITC blocks older Samsung phones for violating two Apple patents December 23: Google initiates legal action against Rockstar Consortium
