Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The U.S. Supreme Court issued three decisions on the morning of April 29th. One of these, the one that got all the press, concerned certain air-pollution rules by the EPA. The rules survived a challenge from the affected utilities. The other two involved the fee-shifting provision of the Patent Act. It seems to me that these decisions address the trolling problem in patent law. In preparing to write this blog entry I discovered that I have never yet used the word "troll" in a patent-law context in the history of Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed . I'm happy to remedy that defect now. Troll, troll, troll. In the precursor to this blog, Pragmatism Refreshed , I used the word often, as  here  for example, or here. Anyway, in patent-law circles a "troll" is a person or entity that collects patents without operational intention. The only reason to hold these patents at all is to engage in or threaten litigation over them. That is, to some of us, a suffici...

It was in October 2011 that David Einhorn presented a slideshow to the Value Investing Conference. I frankly haven't kept close tabs on the consequences: what has happened to the stock price of Green Mountain (NASDAQ: GMCR). The two year stock price chart is available here. GMCR was on its way down, off its September 2011 peak price of $110, before Einhorn said anything. For GMCR, the fall was horrid. The price was below $30 by the start of the new year 2012. It didn't start recovering for more than a year. In September 2012, its patent on its K-cups expired. This was a critical part of Einhorn's original argument : the intellectual property was the moat keeping competitors away. Those neat little pods let you brew coffee one cup at a time in your kitchen, (or in a hotel suite) and people were willing to pay premium prices for that convenience. After September 2012 had passed and the patent protection was lost: at least that loss had been further discounted into pr...