John Thorne, VERIZON Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, speaking at TELECOSM 2007: Our host George Gilder has done more than anybody else to work out the amazing possibilities of Moore's law. Clearly, George is right. Something very important is happening. We are living in a time of exponentially increasing rates of invention, as well as exponentially increasing rates of adoption.

The products themselves are becoming increasingly more complex. A single cell phone carries within it, thousands of patents-worth of innovations, with an exponentially increasing number of circuits packed tighter and tighter together. It's hard to say where one patented invention ends and the other begins. These are “hair-splitting questions,” but the circuits we are talking about are actually much thinner than a human hair.

So what happens when an exponentially increasing number of complex products run up against the exponentially increasing number of patents? That's an impact event…a seismic collision...

In East Texas, a large fraction of new federal patent cases are heard. At first, it might surprise you to learn that East Texas is a magnet for this kind of lawsuit. Texas, after all, is widely rated as having one of the healthiest civil justice systems in America, with a proposition 12 that passed by the voters in 2003 to cap the pain and suffering medical damages. This was a great achievement, but it also means that a lot of plaintiffs' attorneys who enjoyed doing business in Texas are now looking for something to do.

The idling of plaintiffs' attorneys is part of a growing national trend. With class action lawsuits being tightened by Congress, judges applying more scrutiny to securities and anti-trust cases, greater scrutiny being applied to scientific claims, Bill Lerach being fitted for an orange jumpsuit…there are a lot of plaintiffs' attorneys in need of fresh cases.

Plaintiffs' attorneys are nothing if not entrepreneurial. Denying them one type of lawsuit has energized them. So in one East Texas venue, a city of fewer than 20,000 souls named Marshall, one U.S. District Court has become a central patent clearing house for planet Earth.