China's Coming Patent Wars

PriceWarterhouseCoopers publishes an interesting annual summary of patent filings and judgments.  See http://www.pwc.com/us/en/forensic-services/publications/2013-patent-litigation-study.jhtml for this year’s. 
Probably anyone with an interest in patents would want to read it, but a few of my readers might want to read it too.  This is part of a coming information war with China, and China is going to use our own patent system against us.  

I noticed the country filings were missing from this year’s, but they were included in the 2012 report.  They showed the U.S. still in number one for sheer numbers, and Japan a close second;  Germany is third.  China was fourth, but the curiosity about China was not its rising numbers, but the companies filing the most patents, Huawei and ZTE. 

For a full discussion of why the U.S. government might find objectionable these companies involvement in the telecommunications infrastructure  you can read my first book on The Chinese Information War. http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-author=Dennis F. Poindexter&page=1&rh=n%3A283155,p_27%3ADennis F. Poindexter where I noted the ability of the Chinese to circumvent or use our laws against us.  We are too slow to keep up.  This is certainly a thinking ahead and using our system to its maximum.  Once they start filing patents, they can then bring patent suits against every major player in the telecommunications world.  They don’t have to win to be successful.  They just have to play. 

Discovery in the Apple and Samsung wars has produced volumes and volumes of e-mail and inside information about strategies and development efforts.  China’s filings will do the same, but Samsung and Apple have not been accused, by the Federal government, of being too closely tied to the Intelligence services of another country.   Huawei and ZTE have been.   

These two will be able to suck in millions of private e-mails and strategy documents totally unrelated to the specific area being examined.  Few e-mails are limited to single aspect of a particular piece of technology.  They can look at e-mail from partners and clients if they bear on the subject.  Apple looked at a document Google wrote to Samsung about the look and feel of a smartphone, that swung the jury in Apple’s favor, and a billion dollar award.  

These two companies, with their government connections and Communist Party influence, are unable to keep these proprietary documents from getting back to China, even if they wanted to.  The beauty of the whole idea is the Chinese don’t have to expose themselves by hacking companies they are bringing suit against.  We will turn things over to them on a court order. 

It is a clever way to collect business intelligence in the name of preserving patents, legitimately filed.  If our companies did the same thing, working together with our government, it might be fair.  Instead, we better start preparing for war.   They will be using our own court system as a weapon against us.