Gerald D. Hosier (born April 1941) is an American intellectual property (IP) attorney and a patent litigator. In 2000, Forbes magazine declared him the highest-paid lawyer in America, with an annual income of $40 million. [1] [2]
Hosier was born and raised on the southside of Chicago, Illinois, attending Carl Sandburg High School in Orland Park where he was a varsity football quarterback, varsity catcher on the baseball team and on the wrestling team, and an all-conference selection in all three sports. He was also a speed-skater, finishing third in the Tribune Silver Skates National meet at age 14. He was recruited by Northwestern quarterback coach, Dale Samuels, to Northwestern University, during the time Ara Parseghian was the renowned head coach. Hosier gave up college football in favor of baseball, lettering for 4 years on the NU varsity baseball team.
Gerald Hosier received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University and obtained his Juris Doctor from DePaul University College of Law. He is also registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office as a registered patent attorney.
He has served as the main attorney for Jerome H. Lemelson, the named inventor on 741 US patents, and the self-proclaimed inventor of bar code scanning. [3] Although Lemelson died on October 1, 1997, Hosier continued to litigate to enforce Lemelson's patents on behalf of Lemelson's heirs, including the Lemelson Medical, Educational and Research Foundation (Lemelson Foundation). The American Lawyer reported his income for 1992 at $150 million. [4] Lemelson was a noted philanthropist; [5] Hosier was once known as a lavish spender, [6] but Hosier has set up a Hosier family foundation that makes many charitable contributions, such as being a major sponsor of the Aspen Institute.l. Hosier and noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, John Doerr, were the anchor donors for the 25,000 sq ft Doerr-Hosier Center at the Aspen Institute. Hosier is an avid pilot with over 4500 hours flight time. He holds private, multi-engine, instrument, commercial and airline transport pilot ratings and three jet type ratings in a Citation CJ1, a Falcon 2000 and a Gulfstream 550. He has owned a wide range of airplanes including two warbirds, an L-39 Albatros fighter jet and a Pilatus PC-7 military turboprop trainer. He currently owns and flies a Stemme S-10VT motor glider, a Twin Diamond DA62, a Pilatus PC-12 and a Gulfstream G550, which has a 14hr/6750NM range. He has been in over 70 countries with the G550.
In 2005, the key Lemelson patents on bar code scanning were declared invalid for prosecution laches, [7] unduly delaying the patent application process so as to issue the patents long after the invention would have been thought to be public domain. This loss has reduced Hosier's income and influence. Hosier is on the board of trustees for the Aspen Institute. [8]
Hosier has been characterized as a patent troll, in fact the "Babe Ruth of patent trolls," a statement attributed to Judge Kimberly Moore of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. [9] Patent Attorney Raymond P. Niro credited his former partner Hosier with being the pioneer patent troll, disclaiming the honor for himself, citing a 2001 blog story bracketing a picture of Hosier with a picture of a troll. [10]
Hosier won a $48 million award from Citigroup in 2011 in a case charging the "Citigroup misled their wealthiest clients and then tried to blame them for relying on what they were told." Hosier said Citigroup's Smith Barney unit was "out there manufacturing products with no utility whatsoever except for generating fees." [11]
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights. In some industries patents are an essential form of competitive advantage; in others they are irrelevant.
Pro bono publico, usually shortened to pro bono, is a Latin phrase for professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment. In the United States, the term typically refers to provision of legal services by legal professionals for people who are unable to afford them.
Jerome "Jerry" Hal Lemelson was an American engineer, inventor, and patent holder. Several of his inventions and works in the fields in which he patented have made possible, either wholly or in part, innovations like automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders, and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony's Walkman tape players. Lemelson's 605 patents made him one of the most prolific inventors in American history.
A submarine patent is a patent whose issuance and publication are intentionally delayed by the applicant for a long time, which can be several years, or a decade. This strategy requires a patent system where, first, patent applications are not published, and, second, patent term is measured from grant date, not from priority or filing date. In the United States, patent applications filed before November 2000 were not published and remained secret until they were granted. Analogous to a submarine, submarine patents could remain "under water" for long periods until they "emerged", surprising the relevant market. Persons or companies making use of submarine patents are sometimes referred to as patent pirates.
Gary K. Michelson is an American orthopedic surgeon, medical inventor, and billionaire philanthropist.
In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art, often through hardball legal tactics. Patent trolls often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question. However, some entities which do not practice their asserted patent may not be considered "patent trolls" when they license their patented technologies on reasonable terms in advance.
Patents are legal instruments intended to encourage innovation by providing a limited monopoly to the inventor in return for the disclosure of the invention. The underlying assumption is that innovation is encouraged because an inventor can secure exclusive rights, and therefore a higher probability of financial rewards in the market place. The publication of the invention is mandatory to get a patent. Keeping the same invention as a trade secret, rather than disclose by publication, could prove valuable well beyond the time of any limited patent term, but at the risk of congenial invention through third party.
Ashok Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as Director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Air Academy High School (AAHS) is a public high school in El Paso County, Colorado, United States that serves the northwestern end of Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the United States Air Force Academy. Air Academy is a part of Academy School District 20. It is the only high school in the U.S. built on a military academy.
John A. Rogers is a physical chemist and a materials scientist. He is currently the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University.
The DePaul University College of Law is the professional graduate law school of DePaul University in Chicago. The College of Law’s facilities encompass nine floors across two buildings, with features such as the Vincent G. Rinn Law Library and Leonard M. Ring Courtroom. The law school is located within two blocks of state and federal courts, as well as numerous law firms, corporations and government agencies.
T. John Ward is a retired United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. He is best known for the large number of patent infringement cases brought before his court in Marshall, Texas.
Theodore H. Frank is an American lawyer, activist, and legal writer, based in Washington, D.C. He is the counsel of record and petitioner in Frank v. Gaos, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the issue of cy pres in class action settlements; he is one of the few Supreme Court attorneys ever to argue his own case. He wrote the vetting report of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for the John McCain campaign in the 2008 presidential election. He founded the Center for Class Action Fairness (CCAF) in 2009; it temporarily merged with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2015, but as of 2019 CCAF is now part of the new Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a free-market nonprofit public-interest law firm founded by Frank and his CCAF colleague Melissa Holyoak. The New York Times calls him the "leading critic of abusive class-action settlements"; the Wall Street Journal has referred to him as "a leading tort-reform advocate" and praised his work exposing dubious practices by plaintiffs' attorneys in class actions.
Richard "Rick" G. Frenkel was an in-house intellectual property counsel and director of intellectual property at Cisco Systems. He was once the anonymous author of the Patent Troll Tracker blog, focusing on the subject of "patent trolls" and "a must-read blog among top intellectual property litigators".
The Lemelson Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) private foundation. It was started in 1993 by Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife Dorothy.
Legal scholars, economists, activists, policymakers, industries, and trade organizations have held differing views on patents and engaged in contentious debates on the subject. Critical perspectives emerged in the nineteenth century that were especially based on the principles of free trade. Contemporary criticisms have echoed those arguments, claiming that patents block innovation and waste resources that could otherwise be used productively, and also block access to an increasingly important "commons" of enabling technologies, apply a "one size fits all" model to industries with differing needs, that is especially unproductive for industries other than chemicals and pharmaceuticals and especially unproductive for the software industry. Enforcement by patent trolls of poor quality patents has led to criticism of the patent office as well as the system itself. Patents on pharmaceuticals have also been a particular focus of criticism, as the high prices they enable puts life-saving drugs out of reach of many people. Alternatives to patents have been proposed, such Joseph Stiglitz's suggestion of providing "prize money" as a substitute for the lost profits associated with abstaining from the monopoly given by a patent.
Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP is a litigation boutique located in San Francisco, California, founded in 1978. The firm's areas of practice include intellectual property, professional liability, class actions, wrongful termination defense, general contract and commercial litigation, antitrust, white collar crime, and appellate.
Stephen Daily Susman was an American commercial plaintiffs attorney and founding and name partner of Susman Godfrey LLP. He won more than $2 billion in damages and settlements in just three cases, including a $1.1 billion settlement on behalf of Texas Instruments in Samsung Electronics v. Texas Instruments, and a $536 million jury verdict in El Paso Natural Gas Co. v. GHR Energy Corp.
Cardinal Warde is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works on optoelectronic materials for information processing, communications and holography. Warde is involved with education policy in the Caribbean, acting as a scientific advisor for the Government of Barbados and helping high school students access science education.