Patently-O TidBits

• Last month, TiVo won its patent case against EchoStar.  The district court judge issued a permanent injunction and refused to stay the injunction pending appeal. In an emergency action, the CAFC immediately issued a temporary stay. Now, the CAFC has reportedly determined that the stay will remain in force until the appeal is concluded. [Can someone forward the order to dcrouch@gmail.com]. [Background]
• Attorney David Donoghue continues the trend of local IP litigation blogs — he’s focusing on Chicago district court cases here. He also continues the trend of using the industry leading law blog developer - LexBlog.
• My former property professor Richard Epstein recently gave an excellent talk on the “big tent” theory of property that spans the space from real property to water rights and, of course, intellectual property. [video] [paper — very accessible]. Highlights:
• Supreme Court made a “complete intellectual hash” in the eBay case.
• Troll problem: unfortunately dominated the discussion because this is a fringe issue.
• Fewer injunctions lead to compulsory licenses, and the damage model for compulsory licensing is pretty poor. [forced business relations don’t work well anyway].
• The potential for troll-like holdouts are better than forced exchanges.
• Lear should be overturned — contract rights should be strong because that gets you better licensing transactions. (these are hard enough deals to complete without the ambiguity added by Lear).
• Independent Ink: Patents do not confer a monopoly — that was a correct decision because there are many cases where patents do not confer any economic control over a market.