Posts in Inventors Information

I was told that elected officials count on—in fact, they need—constituent input to be effective legislators. After my patents were unjustly cancelled at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), I started the journey to do this very thing. Since January of 2022, I have visited Congress and the Senate two dozen times. I have visited over 200 offices telling my story and advocating for the “little” inventors, like me.

On July 17, inventor advocacy organization US Inventor and conservative interest group Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund filed a joint amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court urging the nation’s highest court to grant the petition for writ of certiorari filed in Killian v. Vidal. US Inventor and Eagle Forum ELDF’s brief is the latest call upon SCOTUS to address the “dire consequences” flowing from the dramatic expansion to judicial exceptions to patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

In April, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requested public input on an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). The Request for Comments (RFC) allowed the public to voice their opinion on the proposed rules, including hundreds of real, authentic inventors. In the past, US Inventor has asked its members to use their voices and write comments for the USPTO’s requests. Typically, these requests generate at least 100 responses from USI’s members. This time, USI decided to level the playing field and give its members a chance to speak as loudly as its adversaries. We generated nearly 2,400 real comments from inventors, patent holders and concerned individuals. 

Last week was a big one for the potential future of the U.S. patent system. The deadline for comments on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on “Discretionary Institution Practices, Petition Word-Count Limits, and Settlement Practices for America Invents Act Trial Proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board [PTAB]” was Tuesday, June 20…. Then, on Thursday, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), with some help from their colleagues, introduced two new bills that would have major implications for patent eligibility law and PTAB practices, respectively. Below are some other perspectives from a range of IP stakeholders.

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) revolution the world is currently experiencing is powered by data. But what exactly are “data” and how can we make the term fit for use in the complex landscape of generative AI? In simple terms, data in this context can be any digitally formatted information. However, there is an inconsistency in the usage and understanding of the term when it comes to what is encompassed in a dataset used for training a generative AI model. Often, there is metadata or even identifiable information which, although possibly unintended, ends up being part of the training data. There can also be legal implications linked to the data, including systems trained on copyrighted or licensed works, or, for example, systems trained with any visual or textual information containing personal health information.

As of the morning of June 20, which was the deadline for public comment on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) on Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practices, the agency had received nearly 14,000 comments. On either side of the debate, the USPTO’s proposed “compelling merits” standard for circumventing Fintiv discretionary denials generated a great deal of feedback. The following comments from well-known thought leaders and companies encapsulate many of the issues that the USPTO must navigate as it contemplates changes to PTAB practices.

With the comment period set to close on June 20, more than 11,000 comments had been filed as of Friday, June 16, in response to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practices. Only 265 of those had been posted as of Friday, however. The ANPRM was…

In 2015, China launched its 2025 Initiative listing all the technologies and industries it wants to control by 2025. So far, they have been successful in leading 37 of 44 technologies critical to economic growth and national security. The nation that dominates these technologies will determine the fate of all nations. In the past, the United States led the world in technology, but today it is China. How did this happen? This damage was caused by a series of big hits by the courts, congress and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The first big hit was eBay vs. MercExchange (eBay) in 2006. In order to obtain an injunction, a patent holder must prove that they not only have a patented product on the market, but also the ability to distribute that product. eBay let loose massive predatory infringement, killing off startups, the biggest competitive threat to Big Tech and many other industries.

Some of the earliest chapters in the story of U.S. innovation have been written by Black Americans who not only advanced the state of industry in our country, but also fought to ensure that they were credited for what they achieved. Within the next few years, the city of Newark, NJ, will be the home of a museum properly paying homage to the historic contributions that these inventors have made to medical science, telecommunications, transportation and more.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a crucial tool for organizations in various sectors, particularly in the generation of content and code by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, AlphaCode, Bard and DALL-E, among other tools. As the promise of incorporating these generative tools in the corporate setting is all but assured in the near term, there are a number of risks that need to be minimized as companies more forward. In particular, as AI applications grow increasingly sophisticated, they raise concerns with several forms of intellectual property (IP), such as patents, copyrights, and trade secrets. This article aims to discuss these issues and provide a sample company policy for using AI-generated content such as software code.

Bacon is delightful. And the similarly savory subject of who must be named inventor on a bacon patent was the issue in the recent case of HIP, Inc. v. Hormel Foods Corp., No. 2022-1696 (Fed. Cir. May 2, 2023). HIP claimed that one of its employees materially contributed to the invention of Hormel’s patent on methods for precooking bacon. The question of what makes one an “inventor” was central to whether HIP’s employee should be added to the patent. More broadly, questions about inventorship and authorship have become central to recent commentary and speculation about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on intellectual property law. While AI did not factor into HIP v. Hormel, the decision provides a useful reminder about the role of the common law in developing answers to these momentous questions.

The issue of AI inventorship in the United States remains at large following the Supreme Court’s denial of cert in Thaler v. Vidal, meaning that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) finding that AI cannot be considered a named inventor to a patent application remains the law of the land. Now that the agency is seeking public comments on the issue of AI inventorship, I reached out to Dr. Thaler to get his comments on the current AI inventorship debate within the patent space.

On May 2, Northeastern University hosted the IP awareness and literacy organization The Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU) for its 6th Intellectual Property Awareness Summit (IPAS), titled Bridges, Not Barricades. The view of Boston’s skyline from the 17th floor conference room on St. Botolph Street served as an appropriate backdrop to a series of expert panels exploring efforts to unleash the next generation of American economic development by accelerating popular understanding of the value of obtaining IP rights.

On Tuesday, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced the 12 inventors and inventor teams that have been selected as finalists for the 2023 European Inventor Award. The EPO placed three finalists each into four groups: Industry, Research, SMEs, and Non-EPO Countries. Members of the public can vote for the winner on the EPO’s website. The finalists hail from 12 countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, and the United States. An independent jury of former European Inventor Award finalists used their expertise to select this year’s finalists.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), in a precedential decision, today reversed a district court holding that an inventor should be added as a joint inventor for his contributions to a patent for methods of pre-cooking bacon and meat pieces. The CAFC said the inventor’s contribution did not satisfy the three-part test articulated in Pannu v. Iolab Corp. because the contribution was “insignificant in quality.”