Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
OrcaTec: Recommind's Actions Attempt to Bully the Marketplace
June 16, 2011
If Recommind wanted publicity after announcing that it had patented predictive coding, it certainly is receiving it. I got the following note from Herb Roitblat, the CTO at OrcaTec:
"Hi Sharon.
Thanks for your comments about the Recommind patent. I don't think that the question is how long the Recommind patent will stand, rather it is the scope of the patent. They actually disclose the use of relevance feedback in the paper attributed to Thorsten (that's actually his first name, it should have been to Joachims). This paper describes the use of support vector machines, and it mentions relevance feedback. Their patented process makes use of both, but obviously, they did not invent either of these.
By my reading, their patent covers the use of relevance feedback, probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA), and support vector machines in document classification. Of these, they have a preexisting patent on PLSA. The other two are covered by prior art. The lawyers will have to decide, but it seems to me that unless one's predictive coding employs specifically these tools in this way, that there would be no conflict. Recommind's implied threat seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to bully the market place. They failed at cornering the market by trademarking the term predictive coding, and, apparently, thought that they might still succeed by claiming to have patented all of predictive coding.
OrcaTec will continue to offer highly effective predictive coding."
Herbert L. Roitblat, Ph.D.
CTO, Chief Scientist, OrcaTec
770-650-7706 x229
Other thoughts from those using predictive coding or e-discovery folks generally?
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