As Congress Considers PERA, It Should Allow the Frustrated Inventor to Be Heard

A person recently approached me at church with excitement regarding a software process he developed. His company was so pleased with the result that it is filing a patent, listing him as the inventor. This person knew that I had some kind of patent backstory, so he asked for my thoughts.

My name is Jeffrey A. Killian, and I am the patent applicant in the Federal Circuit case # 2021 -2113 (In Re: Killian). I took no pleasure in telling my  friend at church that his patent application will be rejected. Plus, the official notice will have my precedential case quoted all over his rejection. With friends at church like me, who needs enemies?

How We Got Here

The conversation with my friend has me thinking about my case again. For the second time in four years, two people in the same church congregation of just 150 people are being affected by the discovery of a new and useful software process. This observation is either coincidental, or the killing of software patents is prevalent.

This article is not about the debate regarding the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), although my federal case is applicable to that debate. This article is about how low-quality patent applications were approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over the years, how the courts subsequently burned down the entire forest to eliminate the weeds (low- quality patents), and how inventors who really solved a problem are now caught in the flames.

I have found terms such as “Poster Child” and “Sacrificial Lamb” describing my case by the legal community and advocates. The courts do not care what social problems are being solved using a computer; with “mental steps,” the patent will still get rejected. The process must improve the function of the computer itself, and the courts have emphasized that point with overkill. A common person cannot possibly understand the logic that helping computers function better is more important than helping people function better.

The Invention

My invention is patent application #14/450,042 and it represents a process that discovers overlooked Social Security Disability Insurance (S.S.D.I.) benefits for adult people with a disability prior to age 22. Medicare benefits also become available when eligible for the monthly Social Security Disability Insurance (S.S.D.I.) benefits. Accordingly, when the Social Security Disability Insurance (S.S.D.I.) benefit is overlooked, so is the Medicare coverage for the person with a disability.

The oversights occur because eligibility is the working record of the parent of that adult child. The Social Security Administration cannot simply run the Social Security number of the adult child to successfully determine the Social Security Disability Insurance (S.S.D.I.) benefit. In addition, the working parent needs to be retired, disabled, or deceased to trigger the benefit for their adult child, and those triggering events cause their own set of problems in the process.

The Social Security Disability Insurance (S.S.D.I.) benefit process is further complicated upon submission of the parent’s own Social Security retirement benefit application:

• Unawareness: The retiring working parent fails to name their disabled adult child on the Social Security application. It is beyond the general public’s comprehension that an adult child age 40 could possibly be eligible for Social Security from the parent’s work record. The adult child may have never worked and possibly has not been in the parent’s household for over 30 years (institutionalized)
• Divorce: The working parent divorced both the custodial parent (spouse) and basically divorced the children. The wage earner had no further association with either of them or skipped the question regarding adult children
• Fraud: The working parent intentionally omits the adult child to affect more benefits for other household members. The wage earner’s benefits are never affected but payments to other household members can be reduced up to 50% with additional claimants, hence, the motive to commit fraud and omit the non-household adult child with the disability

I want to testify in Congress as a small inventor about PERA since my case seems to have many aspects that PERA wants to correct. I feel Sections 102 and 103 of the U.S. patent law would weed out the low-quality patents and those sections already do a great job. My process met Sections 102 and 103 and those sections were not in dispute. The court used Section 101 as the “be all end all” quantifier to deny my process, thus not looking at the real aspects of my process.

The courts are also using Section 101 as a shortcut to avoid looking at the evidence, prior art, or what the invention accomplishes. PERA would correct this injustice and focus the patent examination on the real merits of the process. I have recently emailed both Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC). Hopefully, I will get the chance to testify.

Here are the boxes my personal case checks:

Maximum evidence:  My patent application had maximum evidence to prove the new, helpful, novel, and non-obvious aspects. The evidence included two university studies, Marquette University and “THE” Ohio State University, plus documents from every possible end user in the country,  which are documents from all 50 State Medicaid authorities.

Over 1 million working professionals who could not solve the problem:   The number of working professionals at both the Social Security Administration, since the inception of the Social Security Disability Insurance program on July 1, 1956, plus the employees in the Medicaid program effective in 1967 easily has over a million people aggregately employed at the federal, state and local levels since those dates. Many of these working professionals have law degrees, the same law degrees as the judges who scorched Earth with my patent application. Certainly, at least one of those million working professionals at the Social Security Administration and Medicaid programs could have applied “mental steps” if my solution was just that easy. Instead, the working professional’s real life handling of the Social Security benefit oversight problem for decades is trivialized as something that “mental steps” could have prevented using pencil and paper.

Straightforward and simple: A person does not have to be a rocket scientist to understand the goal of my process. My patent application just wanted to find people who had their Social Security application already processed, a mistake was made, and my process corrects the error. No scientific mumbo jumbo, just plain straightforward words to correct a mistake and help a person with disabilities.

Meets the written rules:  The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) wrote in a decision that my application met the law as written by Congress, however, it did not meet the court’s case law. As a common person, I may never understand that statement. Play by the rules, submit the maximum evidence, be congratulated by my peers for solving a decades old problem, and still my process is not good enough for a patent.

A Plea to Congress: Hear My Story

Many outstanding inventions have come from small inventors. What incentive does a small inventor have to solve a great problem with a software process after knowing what happened to my patent application?

My hope to testify in Congress is not about me; res judicata will prevent my process from ever receiving a patent. All my investors have dried up—no patent protection, no investment. My attorney, Bud Mathis, did an excellent job. He threw every possible legal punch at the court’s brick wall to have common sense prevail, with no success. The only thing that remains is to tell Congress my story. Perhaps someone reading can make my testimony  to Congress a reality.

Maybe the law will change and my friend at church will get his patent.

Image Source: Deposit Photos
Author: iqoncept
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