Posts in Interviews & Conversations

Conservatives Should Have No Part of Patent Reform

”We have corporate interests masquerading the drastic overhaul of the patent system as mere tort reform… It makes no sense to undermine long-standing property rights to address a supposed litigation explosion that doesn’t exist with a supposed tort solution that doesn’t apply.”

Provisional patents are like chicken soup, good for everybody

”Even a startup with strained resources can afford to file provisional applications. As a result of the American Invents Act and the fact that the United States is now a first inventor to file country, it is advisable for any company to file provisional applications as soon as they have a meaningful invention and have the ability to put it down in an application and file it. So, that would be the most important advice I can give.”

Congress expected to take up federal trade secret legislation in 2015

There was a lot of action on this in the last Congress. There is a group of law professors that have expressed some opposition to the proposal to add a civil remedy, in spite of widespread support among industry stakeholders. There was some controversy around some seizure provisions that were suggested in one version of the legislation. And I think those discussions will usefully inform what will be done in this Congress. But I believe there is a great deal of support for making that basic change to allow companies to have another—not a displacement, not preemptive of state law but an additional place to go to get the benefit of nationwide service of process and other special advantages of being in federal court.

Michelle Lee on patent quality, IPR and trade agreements

During our interview Lee explains that she is supportive of expanding trade agreements currently under consideration in Congress, that she looks forward to working on patent quality and receiving feedback from stakeholders on how the Office can better address patent quality, and she explained that the Office was pleased with the recent Federal Circuit ruling in In re Cuozzo Speed Technologies, which is the first appeal of a final decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in an Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceeding.

Common currency creates challenges for the unitary patent

With the Euro once again in crisis people look back on the decision to go with the common currency and many people here believe that that was a step too far. That engaging in the expectation that if we do this it will naturally bring us closer together was perhaps way too optimistic. And too risky. And that risking the kind of fiscal instability that we have seen recently in order to push everyone towards a closer political union some people are saying now was a very bad bet to make, without a real supra-national bank and without having first knitted the countries together better politically.

Harmonization and the quest for an elusive international grace period

An interview with Jim Pooley, former Deputy Director General of WIPO – The actual changes that we might have to accept in a truly globalized, harmonized system are not going to be that difficult for us. The real difficulty is getting everybody to agree on one set of best practices. That, it turns out, is a political road that is just as difficult now as it ever has been. But the goal is clear, the goal is compelling and I think all of us need to work as hard as we can to push things in that direction. First of all we’ve got to get the industrialized countries to agree on a single approach, or at least an understood and aligned approach, to a grace period. Once that happens I think the other issues that we have to deal with will fall into place. We have to keep in mind that while the politicians or diplomats argue with one another, we have sitting on the sidelines all of our clients who are cheering for harmonization. They want to see this happen. And at the end of the day politicians need to recognize it’s the users of the patent system that own it and we need to make sure that they get the system that they deserve.