Posts in Guest Contributors

In Part I of this two-part article, we provided an analysis of the Wi-Fi 6 litigation and technology landscape. This Part II discusses important changes to the IEEE rules governing the reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing encumbrances on SEPs held by participants in IEEE standardization work. Unfortunately, these rule changes fall short of clarifying what RAND means for Wi-Fi licensors and implementers. Instead, fueled by Wi-Fi 6’s growing valuation and adoption of heavily patented core technologies from LTE and 5G, the rule changes arguably will only heat up the current litigation trend.    

For well over a year, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and some members of Congress have engaged in a campaign to urge the Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to break patents on pharmaceuticals to lower drug prices by invoking a century-old statute, Title 28 of the U.S. Code 1498. This is their “game plan”: HHS should contract with generic drug companies willfully to infringe pharmaceutical patents, thereby requiring any damages to be paid from public funds. This strategy took a new tack in early March 2023, when the Biden Administration’s Justice Department filed a surprise “Statement of Interest” in a private lawsuit on behalf  “the Government and its Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.” The case, filed in Delaware federal court, was initiated by Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences, which allege that that patents they own were infringed by Moderna in producing its version of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Recently, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot program developed by OpenAI, has become a popular topic, attracting much attention and discussion. Its applications in the fields of natural language processing and text analysis have been well documented and have aroused great interest. It can be used to generate various language models, such as natural language texts, dialogues, and question-answering. It is currently one of the most advanced and efficient technologies in the language field. ChatGPT has a wide range of applications. In fields like medical, financial, legal, and media, ChatGPT can also be used to generate and analyze text data, thereby improving work efficiency and accuracy. Recently, the technology has even been used in the realm of intellectual property, with some having used it to draft patent applications.

Wi-Fi 6 shares new technologies with LTE and 5G that are subject to heavy patenting. The firms and institutions that currently monetize their standard essential patents (SEPs) against LTE and 5G will likely be looking to increase their royalty income from Wi-Fi 6 and 6e. This could mean that the recent disputes over LTE and 5G standardization participants’ fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) SEP licensing commitments will spill over into Wi-Fi. Current Wi-Fi litigation trends suggest that this is already afoot, and the recent licensor-friendly changes in the IEEE IPR rules are feared to only fuel this trend.

Just over the mountain of Patent Eligibility Reform awaits The Thiefdom of Efficient Infringers. No other intellectual property criminal enjoys the legal immunities and protections that the patent thief enjoys. Other intellectual property criminals – the copyright infringers, the trademark infringers, and the trade secret thieves – all are subject to both civil and criminal liability, just like every other common criminal. But not the patent thieves. This one type of intellectual property criminal gets favored treatment and special protections under the law. Why is this?

Whether or not the law recognizes a machine as the inventor-at-law, the facts are indispensable to determination of the true inventor-in-fact. In the case of Stephen Thaler’s attempt to obtain patent protection for a food container and light stick he says were independently invented by his AI machine, DABUS, the inventor-in-fact will be either Thaler or his machine. The procedural posture of Thaler v. Vidal caused the discourse to jump over the facts of how the food container and the light stick were invented by DABUS. These overlooked facts may reveal the true inventor, regardless of whether or not the type of inventor is recognized by the current law. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is providing enormous productivity and increased value in many applications. But AI is no panacea and is not yet sufficiently well developed to be precise or dependable everywhere. For example, much better AI training data is required to reliably estimate patent essentiality to standards such as 4G and 5G, where AI is being advocated by various experts and has already been adopted by one patent pool. There is also a lot of room for improvement in inferencing.

Several carefully watched copyright developments are combining to have a significant impact on the invention as well as the content landscape. A judgment from the Supreme Court of the United States is expected any day that will address the potentially shape-shifting Warhol Foundation “fair-use” suit against rock photographer, Lynn Goldsmith. This decision is also of concern to inventors and patent holders, few of whom see the writing on the IP wall: weaker intellectual property rights are gaining momentum, and lawmakers and the public don’t know enough to care.

There was a slight uptick in district court filings last week after a slow January and February, with 43 new patent filings, including a design patent battle involving tumblers and multiple filings indicating an association with high-volume plaintiffs such as Jeffrey Gross and Leigh Rothschild. It was a busy week at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), with over 32 new challenges last week, with only one procedural denial on an institution decision—but that was not based on discretionary denial, which remains often briefed but rarely successful for the time being. Of course, the big news this week was that the Federal Circuit has revived an Administrative Procedure Act (APA) challenge to the Fintiv decision on discretionary denial itself as arbitrary agency action that skirted proper procedure and had an outsized impact on a broad swath of cases.

The USPTO was actively working behind the scenes to revise sections of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure pertaining to the subject of its recent Request for Comments, including policies and procedures relating to restriction, continuation, divisional, double patenting and terminal disclaimer practice. Three days after the RFC response period ended, the USPTO announced publication of a revised version of the MPEP in the Federal Register. The revised MPEP (Ninth edition, revision 07.2022) was made retroactive to July 2022…. An analysis of the revised MPEP reveals that it contains multiple changes that not only fail to address the President’s and Senators’ concerns [patent thickets], but instead actively facilitate more “restriction thickets”.

Israel is known as the land of milk and honey, the Holy Land, and the Startup Nation. And it consistently ranks in the top five countries for number of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) patent applications filed per capita. But due to its relatively small size, it’s understandably not known as a hotbed of major patent deals. Yet, surprisingly, the person responsible for making many of the biggest patent deals in the world happen is an unassuming lawyer based in Tel Aviv, Lillian Shaked.

As James Madison once said, “Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please. And if we the People are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are misused by a minority.” Not often do such lofty constitutional principles intersect with patent litigation. But the Federal Circuit’s decision in Lite-Netics, LLC v. Nu Tsai Capital, LLC, No. 2023-1146 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 17, 2023), upholds strong free speech rights for patent holders. The case deals with an issue of frequent concern for both outside and in-house patent counsel: how much can (or should) be said in the marketplace about a patent dispute?

The quality of issued patents drives the entire patent system. Valid patents fuel innovation, but invalid patents often have the opposite effect. Well-searched claims with clear boundaries, detailed disclosures with understandable teachings, and alignment with the proper statutes, rules and regulations, all contribute to a high-quality patent that an inventor can rely on and that appropriately apprises competitors and the public of the scope of the invention. Although the U.S. patent system overall is still arguably the best in the world, there is room to do things better. Instead of leading the world in issuing robust and reliable patents, we are at risk of being surpassed by China in the innovation arena. It is incontestable that many improvements to drafting and prosecuting of patent applications can be made by both the applicants and examiners to provide more certainty to the validity of issued patents.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal has been on a tear recently, reviewing sua sponte a number of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decisions and designating others precedential. Many of those decisions have helped to make America Invents Act (AIA) proceedings more rigorous and fair, such as the Director’s decisions correcting the PTAB for relying on conclusory expert statements and putting at least some teeth in the real parties in interest requirement. Her most recent interventions in Commscope Technologies v. Dali Wireless IPR2022-01242 and AviaGames, Inc. v. Skillz Platform, Inc., IPR2022-00530 however, add more confusion than clarity to the Fintiv analysis, and more work for parties and the Board, without improving fairness or efficiency.