Brian Prentice

Recently, I reached out to both Intel’s Chief Patent Counsel, David Simon, and Google’s Head of Patents and Patent Strategy, Michelle Lee with two specific questions.

1. Does your organization currently license any of its patents to other organizations?
2. Can you categorically state, for the record, that all patents your organization current holds, or is planning on seeking, are being, or will be directly applied to a product or service that you make?

Both Mr. Simon and Ms. Lee have been outspoken critics – both in blogs and in testimony to the U.S. Congress – of patent aggregators (or, to use their terminology, “non-practicing entities”).

The reason I’m asking these questions is to discern whether they are engaging in exactly the same behaviour as the patent aggregation companies they’re railing against. If the answer to question one is yes, and question two is no then I was hoping to explore the logic of why they feel the law should change to make it as difficult as possible to express these very activities as a discrete business model.

Intel was so kind as to respond in the affirmative to the first question. However, they demurred on the second. Google, on the other hand, ignored the questions outright.

I would be my sincerest hope that both Mr. Simon and Ms. Lee could find the time to respond to these questions. Ideally they could do that on their own blogs and link back to me.

Since both Mr. Simon and Ms. Lee have been on the front foot in advocating legislative changes that will have significant ramifications to the IT industry I would hope they’d be open to engaging in a broader dialogue on the thinking behind their positions.