Author Archive | Guest Blogger

As I discuss at length in The Invisible Hook, those pop-culture phenoms, the pirates of old, had a well-developed system of private law and order. Early 18th-century pirates created rules that prohibited violence and theft; regulated gambling, smoking, and drinking; and established procedures for selecting officers of these laws

A few years ago, as the promised Information Superhighway was growing into the Internet that we know today, no one (to my knowledge) predicted that a collaboratively written, free-content, mass-linked website aspiring to cover all areas of human knowledge would become one of the most prominent information sources in the world. Still less did I […]

My thanks to everyone who has read my guestblog posts this week on the subject of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where I am an editor, an administrator, and an arbitrator (User:Newyorkbrad). Tonight I should address some of the comments on my earlier posts, which I will do in no particular order. (I’ve already implicitly addressed […]

As Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia, becomes more prominent, people often wonder who operates and administers the site. I’m also asked sometimes how I became involved as an administrator. A majority of the people who contribute occasionally to Wikipedia may have little or no interaction with the administrative side of things at all. A […]

(Please read part 1 from last night first; I

My thanks to everyone who has commented on my first two posts about Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. (For those coming in late, I’ve contributed to Wikipedia for about three years and am an administrator of the site and a member of the in-house Arbitration Committee; my username there is Newyorkbrad, after New York, […]

This is the second in my series of guestblog posts about the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, how it is organized and governed, and some aspects of its impact. My thanks to everyone who has commented on my post from yesterday. Later in the week I’ll have a post or two specifically focused on people’s comments, so […]

Hi. Eugene introduced me earlier, and some of you may recognize my name from a recent comment thread or two. As Eugene mentioned, I work as a litigation attorney at a firm in New York City … and I first met him at a summer school mathematics program (which, I would like to remind him, […]

This is my final blog posting, and I’d like to briefly raise an issue with the readers of this series about a complex policy and legal issue: antitrust and its impact on patent pools. Among all the differences between the nineteenth century and the modern age that have been identified and discussed by VC commentators […]

Some might conclude that “patent trolls” are a more serious problem today because of larger problems in patent litigation generally. We often hear reports of an explosion in patent litigation, problems with determining whether patents are valid, problems with determinig patent boundaries, and commercial products being held hostage to the threat of infringement litigation. Such […]

One of the features of the Sewing Machine War that makes it appeal to our modern sensibilities is that it is the first patent thicket in American history in which a non-practicing entity — the inimitable

The story of the sewing machine is an important empirical case study of how the American patent system has long dealt with incremental invention and resulting patent thickets. It’s also a self-contained case study, which challenges the principal focus of the literature on recent inventions and recent changes in patent law, such as the rise […]

In this last of the purely historical posts, I’ll discuss the success of the Sewing Machine Combination, not just in ending the Sewing Machine War but also in serving as a fountainhead for further innovation by its members. Altough the Sewing Machine Combination was repeatedly attacked in court and in the popular press as a

We are now approaching the climax of our story of the sewing machine, as we’ve covered its invention, its patenting, and the rise of the first patent thicket — the Sewing Machine War. How did this patent thicket come to an end? The answer to this question is in the title to this post. By […]

The typical story of the Sewing Machine War is that the incremental invention of the sewing machine through complementary contributions by differing inventors now came to its full fruition with a litany of patent infringement lawsuits. However, Howe and Singer may have had something to do with this descent into full-scale legal warfare with their […]