This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, we speak with James Edwards, a property rights advocate, lobbyist and now also the author of the forthcoming book To Invent Is Divine: Creativity and Ownership, which addresses the disconnect between the attributes of creativity and ownership and human innovation, technological progress, and practical benefits from human creativity and ownership in combination. “There’s something much larger and more fundamental about the the existence of creativity and the inherent ownership that normatively connects with each other,” Edwards explains. “Ownership has to come with creativity. If you’ve got creative ability but you don’t have ownership of what you make that doesn’t work.”

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, we present the remarks made during the Award Ceremony at IPWatchdog LIVE 2025 on March 3, 2025. This year we once again presented two awards at IPWatchdog LIVE; the Paul Michel Award and the Pauline Newman Award. These two awards give us a special opportunity for us to do a couple different things. First and most directly, they enable us to recognize the extremely distinguished careers of the recipients of the awards. But second, this gives us an opportunity to recognize the distinguished careers of two people who have been very instrumental in my development as a professional, and who have been instrumental on our development as a company.

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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.

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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.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we present my fireside chat with Judge John Holcomb of the United States Federal District Court for the Central District of California, which took place March 4, 2025, at IPWatchdog LIVE. We began our conversation with the story about how John Holcomb the patent litigator went from private practice to becoming Judge John Holcomb of the U.S. Federal District Court for the Central District of California. And then we pivot to discussing patent litigation, the makeup of the Central District of California, advice for litigators, experts, the new Rule 702 and Daubert hearings, the role of the jury and how Judge Holcomb divides time for trial, as well as the number of patents and claims best suited for a single trial. As our conversation wound down, we ended on the topic of his judicial philosophy, where he tells the story of three umpires.

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The Trump Administration is making major changes to reduce the size of government to address the $37 trillion federal debt, including withdrawing employment offers to patent examiners and firing patent examiners still within their probationary period. Meanwhile, as the number of examiners is being cut, the backlog of unexamined patent applications is at an all-time high, with some sources saying there are now at least 1.2 million unexamined patent applications pending. And against this backdrop the Federal Circuit has developed an unhealthy obsession with the doctrine of prosecution laches, which creates a presumption that patents are unenforceable if it took longer than six years to obtain.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a dive into the world of university technology transfer and university innovation with Laura Peter, who is the Executive Director of the University of North Carolina Charlotte Office of Research Commercialization and Partnerships and is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during President Trump’s first term. We spend time discussing core patent issues surrounding law, policy and the business of innovation. And our wide-ranging conversation goes on to discuss how other countries engage price control tactics on drugs, which means the United States is subsidizing drugs for the entire world, which is a trade problem and not a patent problem. We proceed to discuss startups, patent eligibility reform, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and much more.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we take a look at the importance of data transparency and standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and standard essential patents (SEPs) in the telecommunications sector. Our guest is Tim Pohlmann, who is the Managing Director for the Americas at LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. And before he joined LexisNexis, Tim was the founder and CEO of IPLytics. Tim has worked at the intersection of data and standard essential patents for a long time, and the themes of data integrity, data transparency and how data can be used to influence and inform decision-making were the focus of our conversation.

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This week we discuss what to expect for the patent world during President Trump’s second term, what to specifically expect from the Patent Office, what to expect in Congress relating to the patent reform bills that we can expect to be reintroduced, namely, PREVAIL, which relates to reforming the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), which relates to reforming the law on patent eligibility to make it easier to patent software—including artificial intelligence—and to make medical diagnostics patentable again, and RESTORE, which relates to overruling the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange, which has made it virtually impossible to obtain injunctive relief even when patent owners win and prove ongoing infringement.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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