Posts in Guest Contributors

Michelle Lee talks about transparency, but the PTO is hiding behind redacted pages and claims of privilege to deny a legitimate FOIA request from Kyle Bass. “I don’t want to be embarrassed” is not a grounds for privilege and improperly asserting privilege is not being transparent… On page 407 there’s an email to Michelle Lee with briefing materials for the BIO meeting that were prepared by BIO. Not only are the many pages of the BIO briefing materials themselves redacted, but in the email the list of what’s included is redacted. We don’t even know what’s missing. How can materials prepared by BIO and shared with Ms. Lee be privileged?

Each week, we succinctly summarize the preceding week of Federal Circuit precedential patent opinions. We provide the pertinent facts, issues, and holdings. Our Review allows you to keep abreast of the Federal Circuit’s activities – important for everyone concerned with intellectual property. We welcome any feedback you may provide. – Joe Robinson, Bob Schaffer, Parker Hancock, and Puja Dave 83-2.…

What we can, and should, address are institutional challenges. Regrettably, our institutional approach to patents has only further challenged small business and diminished innovation. Those challenges come from changes to our patent law in the America Invents Act (AIA), and precedent that has compromised the exclusive nature of the patent right (eBay v. MercExchange), and rewritten the law of patent eligible subject matter (Alice, Mayo and Myriad). Perhaps most significantly, pending legislation (S. 1137 and H.R. 9), if enacted, will further curtail the patentee’s ability to enjoy the rights granted and to seek just reward for infringement. On top of all this is profound uncertainty as the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) struggles to keep up with these changes.

Finally, the Court held that the Board’s denial of Nike’s motion to amend for failure to show patentable distinction over “prior art not of record but known to the patent owner” was improper. The Court held that the Board’s finding that Nike’s “conclusory statement” was “factually inadequate” under its interpretation of the Idle Free decision was too rigid and was an improper ground to deny Nike’s motion. Accordingly the Court affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded the decision to the district court.

Justice Scalia never hid the fact that patent law was his “blind spot”. He also admitted to often taking his cues on IP issues from his colleague Justice Ginsberg. On a Court that has not been kind to patent owners these past years, Justice Scalia, who never feared a bit of controversy, was generally considered as a “staunch defender of patent rights” (as long as they were valid) and viewed them, rightly so, as property. On the other hand, he is also the first Supreme Court Justice to refer explicitly to “patent trolls” (in the Commil case), and not in a good way… He also famously called out the Federal Circuit jurisprudence on obviousness as “gobbledygook.” Google it; it is not exactly a compliment!

Small businesses and independent inventors are critical to revolutionary advancement of American technology. They file over 20% of the applications at the USPTO, and their patents are more likely to encompass breakthrough inventions, rather than incremental change. While Congress has considered a range of legislative reforms, the other branches of government have also been moving forward with challenges confronting the patent system. It is important for America that we get this right. Thoughtful legislation can further improve the patent system and lead to more job creation and economic growth as long as we remember that it is the patent system fuels America’s innovative spirit.

Several questions every patent attorney should be asking before responding to an Alice rejection are: (1) How many Alice rejections has the examiner issued? (2) What does he or she consider to be the sticking points of the decision? (3) How many applications that received an Alice rejection were eventually allowed? Once an attorney has the answers to these questions in hand, the path to success in responding to an Alice rejection is considerably clearer.

What Kasich doesn’t explain, however, is how he achieved a balanced budget. As part of the Kasich-Clinton deal the budget of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was raided for additional money to help plug shortfalls elsewhere. The appropriations cap placed on the USPTO for fiscal year 1998 was $691 million, and according to the IPO $199 million was collected but diverted, which means 22.4% of fee collections were taken from the USPTO in FY 1998 and used for other purposes… Republicans, including Kasich, love to lay claim to the Reagan legacy. But President Reagan was a supporter of the patent system. He never would have tolerated raiding the USPTO budget for any reason. We know that because it was President Reagan that demanded a build up of the USPTO as part of his overall strategy to make America great again and compete with the Japanese for technology dominance.

The popular media’s reports of the demise of IP rights (especially patents) are premature and greatly exaggerated. IP remains valuable to enterprises of all sizes and types. Further, the notion of open innovation, which reflects not only the social nature of man but today’s technological reality, is here to stay. As a result, IP law practitioners will continue to be called draft, review and negotiate collaboration-type agreements where business, engineering and other legal personnel will continue to insist on the “fairness” of joint IP ownership. Such insistence should always be met with skepticism for its need. And, when such joint IP ownership is unavoidable, its consequences and mechanics must be addressed. In sum: If you must do it, don’t half-a$$ it!

Although categorizing abstract ideas could be helpful, the use of categories expands the risk of overbreadth, especially when the categories have little definition, include sub-categories, and lack negative examples. The PTO should refine the categories of “judicial descriptors,” and do so both negatively and positively, to avoid overbroad application of Alice by examiners. The use of “judicial descriptors” not supported adequately by court decisions has the potential to do great mischief in the area in which I practice frequently, i.e., software and Internet-related patent applications.

In 1903, Henry Ford was hit with a patent lawsuit while watching his first automobiles get loaded into boxcars. IP issues have plagued the auto industry every since. Today, over 110 years later, automakers still deal with IP threats on a regular basis. The number of lawsuits filed against automakers by patent trolls rose from 17 in 2009 to 107 in 2014. These lawsuits often result in six and seven-figure settlements, and represent a serious drain on the automotive industry. With this spectre hanging over their heads, automakers can’t fully innovate, grow and prosper. It is time for the industry to band together and fight back.

Thomson Reuters analysts put their research in high gear to quantify just who the major players in this space are with the “2016 State of Self-Driving Automotive Innovation.” Data was aggregated from the Derwent World Patents Index® collection to identify global patent activity and the total number of unique inventions issued in published patent applications and granted patents were analyzed from January 2010 through October 31, 2015. The findings detail a notable commitment from carmakers and tech companies to advance driverless technology, while uncovering the fact that established automakers are the most likely to have the biggest impact in the self-driving category in the near term.

It seems the since-kindergarten, ingrained notion of sharing supersedes our B.S., M.S., J.D., Ph.D. and/or M.B.A. training in this respect! Pressures to “get the deal done” by our business and engineering clients, as well as the corporate lawyers who may be supporting the deal and always think it’s a good idea, result in IP law practitioners’ capitulation into drafting joint IP ownership clauses. We should have learned long ago, however, that while splitting the baby (i.e., joint IP ownership in this case) may sound “fair” and give us psychological comfort, in reality it is usually undesirable, unwieldy and perhaps unworkable.

Under President Jackson America rebooted the patent system and started numbering patents from 01. The prior patents under the Jeffersonian registration system were re-designated with the letter X. Since the American Invents Act (AIA) in 2011, we now have a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) within the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This PTAB has the authority to hold administrative trials for the purpose of stripping property rights from patent owners. Perhaps we should once again re-designate all issued patents, this time with the letter “Y” after they survive what is essentially a de novo redo by the PTO. Why “Y”? “Y bother to patent anymore”? Or perhaps “Y bother to spend the time and money for a lengthy and onerous examination process that seems to mean nothing”?

A well-developed patent portfolio offers you the ability to defend your R&D investments against competitors, creates freedom to move into new markets, deters corporate asserters and can eliminate licensing fees. How do you produce such a portfolio? Start by identifying potential threats, then balancing reasonable patent portfolio investment with revenue retention, and finally calculating your risks. This post presents an approach for modelling the value of a strategic patent portfolio for companies in the high-tech market (eg, cloud computing, semiconductors, mobile and networking). The biotech and chemical models are similar, but require modification for their specific patent risk challenges.