Over the years as an expert witness I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers. Most are really sharp, some are brilliant, and a few… not so much. Here are some guidelines for treating an expert right.

My book on software intellectual property has just been published by Prentice-Hall.

Peter Huber at the Manhattan Institute argues in the Wall Street Journal that software patents discourage innovation and must be disallowed or restricted. Dr. Huber’s facts are wrong and his conclusion is wrong.

The ADFSL 2011 Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law is a small conference that’s focused on practical results as well as academic research. I attended last year, and presented a paper, and found it interesting and informative. I heard from law enforcement officials, the kind of people you don’t often meet at these types of conferences.

The Peer-to-Patent program seems like a good idea. In order to speed up the granting of good patents and quickly eliminate the bad ones, allow people from everywhere and anywhere to submit prior art. If that’s actually the way it worked, it would be a great resource for finding prior art and making the patent office more efficient. Unfortunately my experience is that the program creates more problems than it fixes.

The Report Generator (“RPG”) is a new program from SAFE that automatically generates draft expert reports and declarations for litigation.

The Supreme Court has decided that Bilski loses his patent, but not because of the machine-or-transformation test. They also ruled that business methods are patentable, as long as they are not abstract ideas.

With all the uncertainty surrounding politics, there is one thing I can be certain of every year. Congress will attempt, or claim to attempt, to reform the U.S. patent system. Patrick Leahy, the chair of the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee, recently announced that reform is around the corner, just as it has been every year for many, many years. Fortunately that corner is always pretty far away. As you can tell, I’m not a fan of so-called patent reform. Here’s a brief explanation why.

The digital computer is usually credited as the invention of two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Funded by the United States Army, the ENIAC computer was designed to calculate tables for launching artillery shells accurately in World War II, but was not completed until after the war in 1946. Unlike earlier computers that had a fixed purpose, ENIAC (meaning “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer”) could be reprogrammed to handle many different purposes. But were Eckert and Mauchly really the pioneers of today’s modern digital age?

There were a number of large lawsuits involving software IP in 2009. We know that CodeSuite was used in many of them (because of protective orders, we don’t know all the cases where CodeSuite was used).