Corporate motivation for correcting mistakes

Companies make mistakes: They launch offensive ads (Motrin anyone?), they omit declarations on packaging, they might even sell a faulty product. Like humans (well not quite) they are not perfect. An interesting post today from Jason Bear about a customer service experience with Nissan.

In short Jason buys car, car does not have roll over sensor as advertised, Nissan sends Jason letter offering $2,000 or to buy the car back, Jason blogs about Nissan’s motivation for the “bribe” or if it might be a social media experiment (we are talking about it aren’t we?) Peter commented on Jason’s blog and we are posting the comment below (for the record – we are not currently employed by Nissan):

Jason,

Having had some experience working inside and consulting to several of the Japanese OEMs I think what you saw was a sincere effort. Yes – we live in a litigious society and so companies want to protect themselves. But, the key here is they got to you first.

Let’s say you had an accident and a roll over sensor might have avoided injury to you or your vehicle. What are the chances that you would think of that, find out about it online, sue, etc. They are present, but in reality not something firms take a proactive stance on.

Nissan happens (like some other firms) to keep good tabs on who buys what and so are able to send you offers to buy more later. Nissan and a few others we know of are more focused on giving you a great customer experience so you come back voluntarily (which ends up being less expensive for them as well in the long run).

Most people do not blog about good experiences with companies and brands – so I commend you for doing so – and your points are relevant – what was their motivation? I honestly think they wanted to do right by their customer first and safeguard second.

Filed under: Automotive, Information, Legal, Marketing , Customer Service, Nissan, Social Media

Patent Chaos

You would think one thing you can count on in our information economy would be that, once you have obtained a patent and fended off challengers, your IP would be legally protected. That is until a legal scholar points out that two thirds of patent appeals judges appointed since 2000 were appointed in an unconstitutional way…and then the Justice Department basically says, “Oops. Our bad.”

Here’s what happened. In 1999 Congress passed legislation (the “Intellectual Property and Communications Reform Act of 1999,”) that changed the way patent appeals judges were appointed. Then in late 2007, the aforementioned legal scholar, John F. Duffy, published a paper showing that this method of appointment appears to be unconstitutional. It is likely that most patent appeals since 2000 had at least one judge appointed under the new system.

No one is entirely certain what will happen now. On the face of it it appears that any patent appeal heard after 2000 could be challenged. In April Translogic asked the Supreme Court to rule on a case that would be the first legal challenge based on Duffy’s analysis. Until then (and perhaps even after that as the Translogic case may be too narrow to set precedent), everything is up in the air.

When the news first broke, we asked a friend of ours who routinely works with patents at a large, well known technology company if he thought this was a big deal, to which he replied, “Sounds like a huge potential impact.” Still, we can not imagine that it is in anyone’s interest to let what was, essentially, an honest mistake about an esoteric issue invalidate billions of dollars worth of patents. No one is claiming that the patent appeals judges were incompetent, just that the appointment process was not correct. We would hope the Justice Department would get a legislative solution to Congress to fix this in the near future. That said, we are wondering if this issue will become conflated with the perennial bugbear of patent reform.

Filed under: Legal , IP, Legal, Regulatory