--- Louis Carbonneau, Founder & CEO of Tangible IP, in his "IP Market Insights" email newsletter, July 31, 2026
Excerpt
July is supposed to be the quiet month. Instead, inside of three weeks we got a UK Supreme Court judgment reopening the question of who gets to price a patent pool, a European injunction that millions of Disney+ subscribers noticed on their own television sets, the abrupt exit of the most consequential USPTO official of the decade, and a data set showing that the entire validity-challenge industry quietly moved house while everyone was watching the front door.
I went looking for the thread connecting them and found it faster than I expected. Not one story in this issue is about anybody changing their behavior. Every single one is about somebody changing their address.
We start in Alexandria, where Coke Morgan Stewart cleaned out her desk on Monday after eighteen months spent rebuilding the PTAB in her own image — and where the architecture she built will now be maintained by people who did not draft it. Then to the numbers, which are extraordinary: IPR petitions at an all-time low, ex parte reexams at an all-time high, and a validity-challenge industry that did not shrink so much as emigrate. From there to Capitol Hill, where PERA reached full committee at last and where Senator Tillis, counting the days until January, has started handing the drafting pen to his opponents. Then across the Atlantic to London, where the Supreme Court just handed Tesla the keys to a rate-setting mechanism that patent owners spent a decade building for themselves — a lesson in careful-what-you-wish-for that deserves to be framed. And we finish in Düsseldorf, with the only patent story this month that your neighbors could see from the couch.
As I have often written, this system does not reform. It reroutes. The only question worth asking each quarter is where the water went.
