Posts in Government

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires delivered his first public remarks on Friday, addressing a number of key issues he has been focused on during his first five weeks in office. With respect to the Office’s backlog, he told attendees of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Annual Meeting that his administration “inherited an unexamined patent application backlog that was an absolute dumpster fire.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Wednesday that it will be making it easier to develop biosimilar drugs in its ongoing effort to lower drug prices. The agency published draft guidance yesterday that recommended relaxing the requirements “to support a demonstration of biosimilarity in a biologics license application (BLA) submitted under section 351(k) of the Public Health Service (PHS) Act.”

Yesterday, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires sent a memo to all administrative patent judges (APJs) at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) informing them that the agency was restoring the practice of requiring petitioners before the PTAB to identify all real parties in interest (RPI) prior to institution. The change is intended to address the exploitation of PTAB proceedings by foreign state-backed actors arising as an unintended consequence of less stringent RPI standards enforced by previous administrations.

On October 24, the National Weather Service Employees Organization (NWSEO) and the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA) filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that Executive Orders Nos. 14,251 and 14,343 unlawfully threaten employees’ rights to organize and bargain collectively, not on the basis of “legitimate ‘national security’ issues,” but to retaliate against unions such as NWSEO and POPA for their efforts to represent employees. The unions are asking the court to enjoin the application and enforcement of the executive orders while the case is litigated and requested a hearing for November 13.

Howard Lutnick has been universally criticized by industry for his reported proposal to tax patent values and revenue share with universities. Howard Lutnick is absolutely right about the problem. Here’s why. The patent system was designed for individual inventors. Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers—these were lone entrepreneurs securing temporary monopoly rights in exchange for disclosing their inventions to the public. But sometime after World War II, corporations and universities completed a quiet takeover of the patent office. Today’s patent landscape is dominated by patent oligarchs: systematic corporate R&D programs filing thousands of applications annually, not individuals pursuing personal innovation.

On day one of IPWatchdog’s Life Sciences Masters 2025, panelists addressed a number of looming policy proposals that are negatively impacting the life sciences industry and urged stakeholders to get involved and speak out in order to minimize their effects. An introductory panel that included program sponsors Sherry Knowles of Knowles Intellectual Property Strategies and Robert Sahr of Wolf Greenfield, as well as Becky Kaufman of Ohio State University’s Office of Legal Affairs, discussed topics including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s patent tax proposal and the administration’s threats to march in on federally-funded university patents.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a Federal Register Notice today launching the Streamlined Claim Set Pilot Program, an initiative designed to expedite patent examination by assessing how a limited number of claims affects pendency and examination quality. The USPTO stated that it “anticipates that focusing examination resources on already-filed, unexamined applications that have a streamlined claim set will enhance efforts to reduce the USPTO’s inventory and pendency.” Applications accepted into the pilot program will be “advanced out of turn (i.e., accorded special status) for examination until a first office action is issued.” After the first office action, the application will no longer be treated as special during examination.

In September 2025, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA), the highest judicial authority of the European Patent Office (EPO), issued its decision in G 2/24. The EBA addressed a procedural question: if a third party (an “intervener”) joins an ongoing appeal, can that party keep the case alive if all the original appellants withdraw? The EBA’s answer was a no. In other words, interveners play only a supporting role in appeal proceedings. They may join an existing appeal, but they cannot take over once the main participants have left the stage.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told US Inventors Conference attendees on Thursday that he will reintroduce the Restoring America’s Leadership in Innovation Act (RALIA). Massie first introduced RALIA in 2021. The bill would repeal the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), inter partes review (IPR) and post-grant review (PGR;) return the patent system to a “first-to-invent” model, rather than first-to-file, and would end automatic publication of patents. Inventor groups such as US Inventor and conservative groups have supported the legislation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Wednesday vacated and remanded a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that–despite rejecting arguments about an APJ’s alleged bias–could result in Centripetal Networks getting its request for a new PTAB panel of administrative patent judges in the face of alleged bias.

In the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011, Congress required the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to establish at least three regional offices nationwide. These offices were not symbolic; they were intended to expand access to patent services, recruit new examiners, and strengthen innovation ecosystems outside Washington, D.C. In 2014, I was honored to serve as the first Director of the Rocky Mountain Regional Office, which provided inventors and small businesses across the Mountain West direct access to USPTO resources. By reducing barriers for entrepreneurs in states like Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, the office became a vital link between the innovation community and the federal government. The Trump administration’s decision to close the Denver office undermines this congressional mandate.

An April 2025 report from the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) titled, “The Heavy Price of GLP-1 Drugs,” presents grossly misleading information regarding the patent protection for semaglutide products (marketed by Novo Nordisk under the trademarks Ozempic, Rybelsus, and Wegovy) and tirzepatide products (marketed by Eli Lilly under the trademarks Mounjaro and Zepbound). The report accuses Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly of engaging in patent abuse to extend protection for their products. This accusation is predicated on I-MAK’s assertion that these companies own large numbers of patents covering their respective products. But, as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) noted in its recent Drug Patent and Exclusivity Study, “simply quantifying raw numbers of patents and exclusivities is an imprecise way to measure the intellectual property landscape of a drug product because not every patent or exclusivity has the same scope.”

Since its introduction in 2023, the pro-patent community has broadly supported what the draft Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) said. However, a potentially monumental, unrelated rider seems to have crept in on the last page of the 2025 version…. Why did the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on IP feel the need to slip in a rider on the judicially created non-statutory doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting (judicially created ODP) in a bill directed to patent eligibility?

In Ex parte Desjardins, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Appeals Review Panel (ARP) – which in this instance included Director John A. Squires, Acting Commissioner Valencia Martin Wallace, and Vice Chief Judge Michael W. Kim – considered a claim directed to training machine learning models. This decision has already been celebrated by many in the IP community for the positive impact it could have for patent applicants and patentees, and indeed this was a great way for Director Squires to make his presence known straight out of the gate.

Last week, former United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Katherine Vidal filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Public Interest Patent Law Institute (PIPLI) with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in In re Cambridge Industries USA Inc., urging the court to set aside the USPTO’s recently adopted “settled expectations” rule for discretionarily denying inter partes review (IPR) petitions.