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Russ Krajec

CEO

BlueIron

Russ Krajec is the CEO of BlueIron, a patent finance company, and author of Investing In Patents, which explains the BlueIron investment model. Russ is an angel investor, registered patent attorney, the former COO of a venture-backed startup company, and an inventor with 30+ US patents/applications.

Recent Articles by Russ Krajec

The USPTO Claims it Wants to Ensure ‘Robust and Reliable’ Patents – But Its Questions Imply Another Assault on Patent Owners

Last October, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Request for Comments on USPTO Initiatives To Ensure the Robustness and Reliability of Patent Rights. Responses to this request are due by this Thursday, February 2, 2023. Patent owners, especially small businesses and independent inventors, need two things of the patent system: 1) Reliability/believability. We need patents that are respected when they are issued. We do not want any doubt about their validity. 2) Flexibility. We use many different strategies during patent prosecution. Many of our strategies reflect the startup-nature of our inventions, where we are constantly working on the product-market-fit. We may need several bites at the apple to effectively protect our invention. The Request for Comments suggests several different changes to patent prosecution, none of which address small companies’ needs.

Are the Pre-Appeal Conference and P3 Hopelessly Rigged? Practice Tips for the Savvy Practitioner

The unadvertised feature is that the Pre-Appeal Conference board is assembled by an administrative assistant in the technology center, but the P3 board is assembled by the SPE. This is a critical difference. With the P3 program, the Office is trying to address an internally perceived problem that they believe they have with the Pre-Appeal Conference, which is the technical knowledge of the third member of the board. The third member of the Pre-Appeal Conference is the first available examiner from any technology center and with any type of technical background. This person is essentially selected at random, and often has no technical competence in the area. With the P3 program, the third person is picked by the SPE. This gives the SPE the ability to stack the deck in their favor, intentionally or not.