The amount of infringement lawsuits in play right now is mind-boggling, and while some have some common-sense merit, others simply don't have a veneer of legitimacy.
"There are other possibilities - such as making copyright or design-patent infringement claims - but the real problem is the amount of infringing activity that's taking place in China, there's just too much of it.
As Jonathan Bauer, manager of corporate environmental programs at Hewlett-Packard, asked: "Are your customers better off having your service with some amount of government infringement than not having it at all?" Bauer posed the question during a breakout session at the GSB/BSR event discussing the human rights implications of a communications crackdown ripped from the headlines.
In this particular case, Viacom was attempting to penalize YouTube for the sheer amount of copyright infringement streaming freely through their site.
Focusing on eliminating the enforcement of low-quality patents, and requiring some amount of investigation into infringement before enforcing a patent, will go a long way toward addressing the problem of abusive patent enforcement.
The amount and type of infringement claims Apple will make are as yet unknown since the company just got their hands on the Australian variants on Thursday of last week.
Yet it lets an enormous amount of harmless and useful infringement slip through the cracks.
Judge Alsup ruled earlier this week that he will decide on whether APIs can be copyrighted, but said it would be up to the jury to decide whether Google's use of the APIs in Android – which have essentially identical names and, apparently, functions as those in Java – are fair use of a limited amount of a copyrighted work, or infringement.
For example, the proposed bill would require a patent plaintiff to add a significant amount of detail regarding the accused infringement than current case law requires.
The MPAA research echoes another study released this week that found the amount of bandwidth used for copyright infringement in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region has grown nearly 160% from 2010 to 2012, accounting for 24% of total Internet bandwidth.
