Of note, just before the end of the year the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office temporarily invalidated Apple’s vaunted “pinch-to-zoom” patent, one of several found to be infringed by Samsung in August – generating a $1.05 billion damages award for Apple. On the same day, Kodak sold its imaging patent portfolio for $525 million to a consortium of 12 buyers (including none other than Apple and Samsung, along with HTC, Faceboook, Amazon, Fujifilm, RIM, Huawei, Adobe and Shutterfly).

In the coming year it’s a safe bet that global patent litigation and multi-billion dollar transactions will continue unabated, but here are a few other key trends we can expect to influence and shape the global IP marketplace.

The rush to the patent office begins

March 16, 2013, will mark the first day that the U.S. switches from a “First to Invent” to a “First (inventor) to File” system, under the America Invents Act (better known as U.S. patent reform). Whereas U.S. patent laws previously attributed priority rights to the first documented inventor, it is now largely the case that the first party to file a patent application will get the patent. Thus we can expect a rush to the patent office by companies large and small – adding to the already huge backlog at the USPTO of some 600,000 patent applications. Small businesses with limited legal budgets likely will be negatively impacted by the change, as it puts them at a pronounced disadvantage to their larger, better funded competitors.

Trolls will invade the cloud

With the number of patent lawsuits increasing every year – more than 3,000 were filed in the U.S. last year – there’s no reason to expect the pace to slow. Much of this litigation is fueled by so-called non-practicing entities, more popularly known as “patent trolls,” that base their entire business model on the use of patent enforcement, typically against multiple defendants.

Patent litigation in general, and troll litigation in particular, thrives in markets where the patent landscape is ambiguous, where there are complex products with multiple features, and where markets experience periods of explosive economic growth. The mobile market has seen its share of litigation frenzy over the last several years, and while the cloud computing market is clearly fertile ground, it will be at least five years before we see the type of  full-blown war mobile is now enduring. That said, the first signs of troll litigation are already emerging, such as CloudingIP, an NPE that filed patent lawsuits against RackSpace and several other defendants last year.

Copyright will take center stage

While patents have been all the rage in the IP marketplace over the last decade, content-related IP such as trademarks and copyrights are moving front and center with the proliferation of digital media and online content. Organizations such as Creative Commons have taken the lead in creating an infrastructure for the sharing of creative content online, giving the creator broad control over terms for sharing it.

The still-brewing debate over the ownership of Instagram photos, though, highlights another alternative to the creator-ownership approach – one that gives control over content to the platform that hosts it. The question moving forward is whether the copyright ownership of digital content will remain with creators or will be transferred to the platforms that host them

IP strategy is moving to the early phase

The Yahoo patent lawsuit against Facebook, filed on the eve of the Facebook IPO, highlights the need for startups to have a strategy around building a strong IP portfolio. While Facebook is no typical startup, it solved the problem in a non-typical way, by spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying patents from Microsoft to quickly increase its arsenal and defend against future litigation.

Obviously, few startups can afford a quick and expensive rebound like that, and therefore one lesson learned in today’s highly litigious marketplace is that any IP strategy needs to start from day one, even for cash-starved startups. Patent litigation against successful startups is picking up, and it is against this backdrop that IP strategy in the early phase is expected to become an absolute necessity for startups that wish to “cross the chasm” successfully.

Competition will go global

A recently published report by the World IP Organization (WIPO) revealed that in 2011, the number of patent applications filed in China exceeded those filed in the U.S. for the first time. That should come as no surprise to anyone following the pace of patent filing in China, an activity that has been prioritized by the Chinese government with the ambitious goal of reaching 2 million patent applications a year by 2015. Another noteworthy trend:  Of the list of the top-50 companies that received U.S. patents in 2011, the vast majority are foreign.

Both trends suggest the continued and increased involvement of foreign companies in U.S. patent litigation (as the mobile patent wars demonstrated), as well as the increased enforcement of IP rights overseas, and, in particular, in Asia.

Efrat Kasznik is president of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP consulting firm, and is also a lecturer on IP strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can find her on LinkedIn.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com

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Blackboard.com, which offers “learning management systems,” became a big deal at a time when many schools were still learning how to put teaching in the cloud. Critics called for a boycott of Blackboard in 2006 after it used a flimsy software patent to sue a rival, and raised fears that it would sue universities that were using their own teaching software tools rather than Blackboard’s products. The controversy abated in 2009, however, when a court found that the patent claims were invalid.

Now, in an intellectual property about-face, the company is no longer brandishing patents but instead helping instructors share their lessons across a free platform. Last week, it announced it would help instructors tag their material with Creative Commons marks, a system of licensing that allows others to use a work without fear of being sued for copyright infringement.

On a practical level, this means that instructors can easily share teaching materials across the world. A marsupial expert in Australia could, for instance, upload her teaching module onto Blackboard’s platform for use by a community college in Kansas. Or an online violin teacher could find new videos to integrate into a cloud-based course.

From a business perspective, Blackboard’s Creative Commons announcement seems to signify a full-on embrace of a freemium model by the education software sector. The company already allows instructors who are not affiliated with a licensed institution to create and host material on its CourseSites platform for free. The new licensing support will make it easier to find and share that material.

So what’s in it for Blackboard, a company that earned nearly $500 million in revenue in 2010 and that was recently bought by a private equity firm? According to spokesperson Anne Duke, the firm makes money by providing paid versions of its software to schools and companies that contain additional features. Blackboard’s decision to make its free version more widely available is likely not only a goodwill gesture but a means of enticing new customers to its paid products.

The decision also comes at a time when Blackboard is facing stiff competition from open source alternatives. More than 350 high schools and colleges, including prominent ones like Columbia and Stanford, are letting teachers and students interact through custom software they have built and adapted themselves. The code for the software is provided by the Sakai Foundation, a non-profit consortium that provides support for new forms of scholarly collaboration.

The current situation in education software — with its fairly healthy balance between open source and proprietary models– is a far cry from the fights of five years ago.

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YouTube's new Creative Commons remix feature in its video editor.

Making legal YouTube mashups just got a whole lot easier. The site’s video editor is now allowing its users to remix existing YouTube videos without violating anyone’s copyright. This is made possible by YouTube adopting Creative Commons licenses, offering users the chance to publish any video under the liberal CC-BY license. It’s a big step forward for YouTube, and a giant leap for Creative Commons, which previously hasn’t played a big role in the web video world.

Here is how the new mashup feature, which is slated to go live at 9 a.m. PDT on Thursday, works: Creative Commons-licensed videos can be found from within YouTube’s video editor through a special CC tab. These videos can then be trimmed, combined with other clips and synchronized to music, just like users have been able to do with their own uploads ever since YouTube launched its video editor a year ago. “It’s as if all the Creative Commons videos were part of your personal library,” explained Product Manager Jason Toff when I talked to him on the phone yesterday.

YouTube's new Creative Commons licensing options.

YouTube’s catalog of Creative Commons clips is being seeded with more than 10,000 videos from partners like C-SPAN, Voice of America and Al-Jazeera. Users also now have the ability to publish any of their own videos under CC-BY simply by selecting the licenses as an option during the upload process.

Toff told me YouTube decided to go with CC-BY to keep the process as simple as possible. “The majority of users will be new to Creative Commons,” he said. CC-BY only requires that users credit the original videographer, and YouTube is automating this process by adding links to the original work next to every mashup video. Toff said that the site might add additional Creative Commons licenses in the future if there was strong demand for it.

Two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can't be reused commercially. Source: Creative Commons.

However, there’s another interesting aspect to the choice of license: Creative Commons has in the past been struggling with the fact that the majority of users tends to adopt more restrictive licenses. The organization estimated that two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can’t be reused commercially, and one out of four can’t be reincorporated into a new work at all.

CC-BY on the other hand allows commercial reuse as well. This doesn’t just open YouTube and its producers new revenue opportunities it also makes it possible to reuse these videos in a much wider variety of contexts. Wikipedia, for example, demands that any videos posted to its site can be reused commercially. Combine that with the fact that YouTube has been converting its entire catalog into the open source WebM format, and there’s little reason why tens of thousands of Creative Commons-licensed YouTube videos shouldn’t show up on Wikipedia any day now.

Creative Commons is also poised to benefit greatly from YouTube adopting its licenses. The organization has gotten a lot of traction amongst photographers ever since Flickr added a Creative Commons licensing options as part of its uploading process. Recent Flickr data reveals the site is now hosting close to 190 million Creative Commons-licensed photos. Its licenses haven’t been nearly as popular in the video space, where it has only been adopted by smaller hosting sites and select individual publishers. YouTube’s sheer magnitude could help to make Creative Commons mainstream for video as well.

Finally, adopting Creative Commons and making licensed videos instantly remixable is a big deal for YouTube too. The site has shown immense growth, with its users now uploading 48 hours of video very single minute. The next big challenge for YouTube is to grow the percentage of this material that’s monetizeable.

The site has been addressing this issue through equipment grants and other programs that aim to help producers to shoot better-looking videos. The new mashup functionality of YouTube’s video editor gives every user a chance to publish videos that look as good as the ones from the pros simply by building upon their works. And who knows, one of these Creative Commons-empowered remix artists may just produce the next Key of Awesome.

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Super Bowl XLV Most Viewed Telecast in Broadcast History; last night’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLV on FOX had an average audience of 111 million viewers. (nielsenwire)

Meet Evan Stone, P2P pirate hunter; Stone has singlehandedly filed almost every file sharing lawsuit in Texas. (Ars Technica)

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Open Attribute, a simple way to attribute CC-licensed works on the web; a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work launched today. (Creative Commons blog)

The movie follows five people in Los Angeles who are affected by the economic crisis. The version released by VODO is entirely in English. Check out a trailer below:

California Dreaming is being released under a Creative Commons licenses that allows non-commercial reproduction and remix. It’s also promoted via VODO partners like Mininova.org and through VODO’s app on uTorrent.

“The combination of Creative Commons licensing and BitTorrent-based distribution via platforms like VODO.net and Mininova.org enables… VPRO to reach new audiences without additional costs and very little extra effort,” said Paul Keller, Public Project Lead of Creative Commons Netherlands, adding: “This presents a huge opportunity for public broadcasters with a relatively small home market to reach international international audiences.”

This isn’t the first time VPRO has experimented with BitTorrent. The broadcaster also released its documentary series Century Of The Cities via Mininova.org last year.

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Creative Commons offers six different free licenses, depending on what rights uploaders want to offer to other users. They can offer those video files with attribution, with share-alike attribution, with attribution but no derivatives, and non-commercial, non-commercial share-alike, and non-commercial no-derivative licenses.

When viewers watch videos that appear on Vimeo, those that are protected by Creative Commons licenses will have those licenses clearly marked in the video information section, along with the file type, file size, length of the video and upload date.

Early last year, YouTube announced that it was testing the ability of certain partners to add downloads and Creative Commons licenses to their videos, rolling the program out with university partners like Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV. But Vimeo’s licenses will be available to all its users beginning later today.

Big bucks bunny picture courtesy of Flickr user Steren Giannini.

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WSJ: iPhone to Have Video; source who’s seen the new model says it has more horsepower and can do video editing. (The Wall Street Journal) The iPhone’s popularity is in part driving mobile video, and according to new stats from Pyramid Research, the number of global users paying for mobile video and TV services will increase fivefold to 534 million by 2014. (CNET)

Best Buy Partners with CinemaNow; movies will be available through the retailer’s web site and on some devices sold in stores. (Video Business)

DTV Switch a Boon to Pay TV and HDTV Sales; the impending analog shut-off has driven 8 percent of U.S. TV households to buy an HDTV, and 5 percent started a new pay TV subscription. (release)

Watch the “Bing-a-Thon” on Hulu; Microsoft promotes its new search tool with an hour-long program on the portal featuring Olivia Munn and Jason Sudeikis; viewers can then watch Hulu ad-free. (The New York Times)

Blade Runner Prequel (Kinda) Series Coming to Web; Ridley Scott’s RSA Films working on the series, which will incorporate story input from viewers and be released under the Creative Commons license. (The New York Times)

Home Premieres on YouTube; Luc Besson’s environmental documentary debuts today in theaters and online (in HD!). (YouTube)

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A new app called FairShare, developed by Attributor, offers a free and easy way to find out. It takes just a couple of minutes to register a site with FairShare, and you can add multiple sites and blogs once you’ve registered the first one.

You start by entering your feed address. A window appears, showing the various types of Creative Commons licenses available.

(If you have a static site with no feed, click the Help link and you’ll find out what to do in the Getting Started section.)

I’d been meaning to add a Creative Commons license image to my blogs, and signing up for FairShare helped me get that off my to-do list.

Once you’ve registered your site, FairShare searches 35 billion web pages to see if your content appears on other sites. You can choose to receive this info through a feed reader. For each page containing your work, FairShare will show you how the reuse compares to your license conditions and point you to a page where you can see more details.

In this case, FairShare caught me red handed; I’d cross-posted some content from one of my blogs onto another site of mine.

Unfortunately, another of my posts contains Obama’s entire inauguration speech, with my comments throughout. So FairShare is now telling me every time portions of that text appear. I wonder how many years that will continue! I’d like to be able to tell the app not to look for copies of that particular post. I asked FairShare about this, and they are, in fact, working on a feature that will let you exclude posts that reuse common speeches or articles. Fortunately, the app already ignores content you have in blockquotes.

FairShare has another excellent feature on the way: a license that will allow you to share ad revenue when your content is being used elsewhere. Hopefully this will help keep content “borrowers” honest while also benefiting the content creators.

FairShare is similar to other plagiarism-monitoring tools, like Copyscape, but the ability to specify the license your content uses and subscribe to the results through a feed reader make it easier to use.

The Internet is still a wild frontier (and some of us like it that way). However, these days, many of us are concerned about managing our online identities, and the web makes it awfully easy for others to find and use content that they didn’t create. So it can be comforting to have tools that allow us to monitor, and have some control over, our own online presence.

What do you use for monitoring how your content is being used?

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Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons repository features a handful of videos, each between 10 and 16 minutes long, that chronicle the conflict day by day. The footage is provided without any commentary and consists of various on-scene shots of destroyed houses and infrastructure, as well as some graphic pictures of wounded children and adults, with the occasional eyewitness account in Arabic mixed in. All of the clips feature Al Jazeera’s logo.

The Creative Commons attribution license used by Al Jazeera mandates that any reuse of the material clearly references the network as the original rights holder, but doesn’t come with any further restrictions. A few broadcasters around the world have been experimenting with Creative Commons and similar licensing schemes in the past, but most of these experiments utilize far more restrictive terms.

German public broadcaster NDR, for example, has been publishing some of its coverage under a Creative Commons license that doesn’t allow any commercial reuse or remixes. The BBC’s Creative Archive depends on even stricter licensing terms that only allow use and reuse of the content within the UK.

So what’s in it for Al Jazeera? The network won’t make any money from others reusing this footage, but it may win a few more eyeballs. Al Jazeera has been struggling to gain a foothold in the U.S. market, where it is largely ignored by cable companies and is still fighting the perception of being a propaganda network.

It tries to bypass the cable gatekeepers by actively embracing online video outlets like YouTube and Livestation. Sneaking Al Jazeera’s logo into as much of the current Gaza coverage as possible with the help of these Creative Commons licenses could prove to be a valuable step toward winning America’s heart and minds.

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Other types of work, like contributing to the digitization at Project Gutenberg, are even more thankless. Adding to the sum of archived knowledge is definitely helpful in a general, charitable sort of way, but is there a more tangible, immediate benefit to you as a web worker as well? In both examples, the answer is yes.

Honing Your Craft

Let’s take a look at the first example, contributing media to the creative commons for non-profit community use. The main advantage here? The ability to work when you’re not working. I know that sounds suspiciously like never taking a vacation, at first blush, but that’s not what I mean.

As freelancers, we all have dry spells. You know what I’m talking about, those seemingly vast expanses of time during which we’re not as busy as we generally could/should be. Contributing to creative commons helps ensure this time is not entirely lost. You can avoid atrophy by continuing to take photos, make music, write, etc., though your reward won’t be financial. Still, it’s better than sitting on your duff.

Generating Business

While you’re honing your craft, you’re also putting your name out there. I know I already downplayed the publicity aspect of doing creative commons work, but that doesn’t mean it’s altogether negated. Your name is still attached to the product somewhere, and, if the work is really outstanding, someone will definitely take notice, and hopefully take the time to track down the source.

Try not to think of this as the central motivator of your work, but definitely keep it in mind to help ensure your quality standards stay high.

CV Benefits

What about the other kind of work, like helping build Project Gutenberg? Aside from the healthy glow your cheeks will acquire after you’ve done something unselfish, you’ll also gain a healthier CV. The kind of work you do in contributing to the creative commons may not necessarily reflect a skill set your employer is looking for, but if you’re searching in the tech industry, it’ll show you genuinely care about and want to help support the development of information and information tech.

There are at least three good reasons to start giving back to the wider internet community. The benefit, for web workers, is that this kind of volunteering doesn’t require you to necessarily go anywhere, receive training, or commit for a definite period of time, so you easily can do it between projects from your home office. It’s a definite win-win.

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