[Corpora-List] Patent application for "Referent tracking of portions of reality"

[chris brew]

>
>
>
> I'd say there's not much to worry about. Patents are mainly used to :
> - show to the world that some research has been done (typically,
> patent from universities, to improve their rank in the Shanghai
> Ranking...) ;
> - be able to threatened your commercial opponents, as a dissuasive
> weapon (typically, Microsoft, Google and Interval Research who just
> woke up from the 90's).
>



> Apparently we are in the first situation.
>
>
The named inventors on the patents look to me as if they are
linked with a healthcare NLP company that has been bought
out by Nuance Communications. Nuance is a big commercial
player in the language technology world, and has used mergers
and acquisitions to build up an extremely powerful portfolio. I
suspect these patents are part of their strategy for controlling
their markets. Not at all surprising.

It is difficult to be definitive about the commercial value of
patents that would probably be struck down in court. Partly
this is because nobody can predict with certainty what a
court would do, partly it is because it is almost always the
commercially sensible thing to do to settle out of court even
if you are in the right.

Patent officers are not usually stupid. But there is a massive
resource imbalance between them and the patent departments
of big companies, so the bureaucratically sensible thing for them
to do is to allow patents if there is the slightest chance that there
could be a valid claim in there somewhere.

Chris



-- 
Chris Brew, Ohio State University
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