Posts in Interviews & Conversations

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Allison Gaul who serves as legal counsel for Boston Consulting Group. We begin our conversation with me asking about what she believes are the biggest legal issues in the IP world today. Gaul did identify several things that stay top of mind for her, with various issues relating to data front and center as the top issue. The second area identified by Gaul was open source, and how many of the AI companies promoting “open source” are really not truly open source because often the model, weights and/or training data are not made available, which makes it seem like these companies are racing to gain market share and ultimately “doing a little bit of a switcheroo.” The third and final thing that Gaul identifies as being constantly top of mind is the overall speed of AI development.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we explore whether artificial intelligence (AI) technology has progressed to the point where it has already achieved consciousness. In a nutshell, the answer is our panel of technologists do not believe AI is very close to achieving consciousness, but that it is indeed possible for AI to reach the point of consciousness, and to even reach the point of self-reflection, which would pose an existential threat to humanity.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation that was recorded at the end of our AI 2025 program in front of a live studio audience.  Joining me were Stephanie Curcio, Clint Mehall, and John Rogitz, who make up the new IPWatchdog Advisory Committee. They have all been long-time attendees at our events, they often speak on panels, they often written articles for us, and now they will help advise me with respect to programs and continue to provide content for IPWatchdog.com. To jumpstart our conversation, I asked Stephanie, Clint and John if there was anything that they heard during our AI program that was surprising. This led into an interesting conversation about the possible existential threat presented by AI, quantum computing, data protection and trade secrets. 

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation with two shareholders from Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, PC. Ed Russavage and John Strand were both speakers on our recently concluded AI 2025 program. As the program wrapped up, and in front of a live studio audience, we sat down to discuss the current state of the industry from a client’s perspective, and focused our conversation on IP risk facing companies and what they can do to mitigate that IP risk.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I speak with my long-time friend Jim Carmichael, who is a former Administrative Patent Judge and the founder of Carmichael IP. In this extended 75-minute conversation, Carmichael discusses ten ways the USPTO could and should fix the PTAB, from fully reclaiming institution authority to eliminating expert witnesses in post grant proceedings to presuming the existence of a nexus for secondary considerations.

This week on this edition of IPWatchdog Unleashed, we speak with Sonja London. Sonia has been general counsel at TactoTek and before that she spent 14 years working for Nokia, where she oversaw Nokia’s consumer electronics licensing, global licensing program for connectivity and video codecs, and was responsible for standardization. Sonja has spent the last year as President of Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), and her time in that role is winding down as LESI’s annual meeting in Singapore approaches at the end of April. Our conversation, which took place April 8, 2025, focuses on intellectual property, globalization, supply chains, licensing and more.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my friend Jason Harrier, former Chief Patent Counsel at Capital One and current co-founder and General Counsel of artificial intelligence (AI) company IP Copilot. I started our conversation by asking Harrier about invention harvesting, which I know from many conversations with in-house attorneys is one of the more difficult but critical important aspects of their job. We begin with a simple question: Why is invention harvesting so difficult and why are in-house attorneys always talking about in terms of what they tried in the past, what they are currently trying and what they hope to try in the future, sounding a little like Goldilocks looking for what is just right, but always out of reach.

Lisa Jorgenson is Deputy Director General for Patents and Technology at WIPO. Jorgenson gave a keynote speech at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025 on Monday, March 3. Jorgenson focused primarily on two questions. First, what are the key trends driving global innovation today? Second, what do those key trends mean for the IP community and the innovators and creators? Jorgenson also came with eye-popping facts and figures, pointing out that global intangibles are valued at over $80 trillion, which is more than the world’s five largest economies combined. And she said the world’s leading brands are now worth over $13 trillion, with 45% of the value being located in the United States.

Further to reports that Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) judges will soon be required to return to the office, the lingering question for many is what effect the order—as well as the current, indefinite hiring freeze—will have on Supervisory Patent Examiners (SPEs) at the Office and on day to day operations of the examining corps more broadly.

This week we speak with Scott McKeown, who is a shareholder at Wolf Greenfield and one of the leading U.S. PTAB practitioners. Our conversation was wide ranging but was dominated by discussion of patent reform efforts and whether the PTAB is working as intended. We discuss bad patents, PTAB reform and more.

The focus of our conversation was entrepreneurship, particularly the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurs looking to dive into the startup world with an innovative product. The road to building and monetizing a better mouse trap requires ingenuity and the identification of opportunity, but it requires funding.

My conversation this week with John White was much like any number of conversations we have had over the years over dinner or drinks. What prompted me to ask John to speak with us this week was an article he recently wrote, which we published on IPWatchdog. It was styled as an open letter to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the incoming co-leaders of the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency. In that article John explains that “the patent system is currently foundered”, but that it can be fixed with “focus and ongoing commitment to see the fixes through to results.” So, that is where we start our conversation, like so many we have had over the last 26 years—what is wrong with the patent system and how should it be fixed.

My conversation this week with John White was much like any number of conversations we have had over the years over dinner or drinks. What prompted me to ask John to speak with us this week was an article he recently wrote, which we published on IPWatchdog. It was styled as an open letter to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the incoming co-leaders of the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency. In that article John explains that “the patent system is currently foundered”, but that it can be fixed with “focus and ongoing commitment to see the fixes through to results.” So, that is where we start our conversation, like so many we have had over the last 26 years—what is wrong with the patent system and how should it be fixed.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we speak with Heath Hoglund, President of Via Licensing Alliance. The conversation takes us deep into the world of audio, video, standard essential patents, patent pools, patent licensing, patent dealmaking, inevitable patent litigation that is often necessary when so much money is at stake, and much more.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we go back in time for a historical conversation about the role patents have played with respect to innovation, and push back on the myth that patents were not necessary for the innovations that took place during the Industrial Revolution. In fact, virtually every invention of consequence during the Industrial Revolution was patented, and patents played a major role in encouraging investment and innovations actually making it to market, just as patents continue to play a similar vital role in the virtuous cycle of innovation. We speak with Arthur Daemrich about the invention of the video game by Ralph Baer, Samuel Colt and his mass produced, fully interchangeable six-shooter, which revolutionized manufacturing. We also discuss Henry Ford, Elon Musk, George Washington, and much more.