If you look closely enough, you’ll find patent numbers on most of the physical products around you. Much like their copyright and trademark cousins, these designations are far from cosmetic. Instead, they serve a statutory requirement to provide public notice about your protected intellectual property. In the case of patent marking, not only does it reduce the risk of infringement because you are informing potential infringers of the patent’s existence, but the notice also marks the point in time to which you can go back for collecting on awarded damages.

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In today’s global economy, the importance of international patent protection cannot be overstated. Your invention could be conceived of with a workforce distributed across several continents. Your manufacturing could occur in Asia or India, while your products are shipped into and distributed from ports in the target markets of the world’s largest economies. Competitors and infringers could be next-door neighbors or perhaps across the pond. But as you’ll learn today, there is no such thing as an International Patent – no one global patent that protects you everywhere. If you want to protect your rights in a particular country or jurisdiction, you need to get a patent in that particular country or jurisdiction.

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As more and more states relax restrictions on both medical and recreational uses of marijuana and hemp, the U.S. cannabis industry is projected to reach $50 billion in sales this year and over $74.6 billion by 2032. This rapid growth is occurring despite immense challenges posed by a complex and conflicting web of legal disparities between federal and state laws. These legal challenges include limited access to financial institutions and the inability to transport products across state lines, but what about patents?

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If a court stripped away your property rights, wouldn’t you at least want an explanation? In this month’s episode of Patently Strategic, we discuss the Federal Circuit’s practice of applying rule 36 at an alarming rate to revoke inventors’ patent rights on appeal without explanation and ParkerVisions attempt to get the Supreme Court to take the case to hopefully stop this innovation-crippling practice.

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So, your patent application got rejected. Now what? In this month’s episode of Patently Strategic, we’re talking about rejection. Specifically, the type that comes from the patent office in the form of an intimidating-sounding three-digit number when your application gets denied by an examiner.

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An invention cannot be patented if the differences between a claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made. Determining obviousness – and the validity of your patent – is more than simply establishing that the invention doesn’t already exist and that it isn’t documented elsewhere. Its conception must also not have otherwise been obvious to those in the field at the time.

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Patent examiners can make mistakes. Patent office clerks can misfile paperwork and cause procedural errors. The software tools, document formats like DOCX, and the IT systems your application passes through can have bugs. What recourse do you have when quality issues creep in at this stage? This is where petition practice, fortunately, comes to the rescue.

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For inventors, the promise of the patent system is the right to exclude others from making, using, importing, and selling their patented innovations for a limited period. But how do patent holders actually enforce those rights, particularly when the infringing product is being manufactured outside of the United States? In an otherwise challenging time for rights assertion, the ITC – or International Trade Commission – can be one of the most impactful long-range weapons an inventor has in their arsenal for stopping patent pirates.

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Void of pursuing continuations, the language of your patent is frozen in time at issuance. The specifics of the enforceable boundaries of your protection are forever fixed to the claims you chose to pursue with your initial application – but not necessarily with the full breadth of your invention as conceived. For many reasons, practitioners and inventors will often choose to limit how much of an invention is claimed in an initial application. But then the future happens.

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The most terrifying thing that can happen to a patent owner is receiving an inter partes review (IPR) petition. This is a tool that accused infringers can use to invalidate patents. And they have … to alarming effect. As we’ve discussed, the kill rate at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is staggering. The PTAB – or, as regular listeners of this audience more commonly know it, the “Patent Death Squad” – has racked up a claim execution rate north of 84% and the death of thousands of valid patents at the hands of infringers looking to profit from innovations they didn’t invest in to create. This is an institution that is clearly out of balance and screaming for reform.

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Is your patent application only good enough to get through the examination process? Or has it been crafted to stand the tests of time and varied audiences if you later need to assert that document against an infringer, find yourself litigating with it in an Article 3 Court at the hands of a judge and jury, God forbid, end up having to defend its validity at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), or even needing to use it to block pirated imports at the International Trade Commission (ITC)? The difference is often quality.

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We’ve seen few entrepreneurial success stories that haven’t involved heavy doses of perseverance, grit, observation, and creative problem-solving. Today’s guest possesses these qualities in spades. And while I can’t necessarily recommend some of the more death-defying specifics of his approach … at least not without a lot of “don’t try this at home” fine print … I do think that most inventors and aspiring entrepreneurs will benefit immensely from studying our guest’s thoughtfully crafted, time-tested, and wildly inventive approaches to innovation and business.

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The difference between getting claim construction right and getting it wrong is the difference between a valid patent and an invalid patent – and potentially the difference between millions of dollars awarded from infringement decisions vs. ending up with a worthless piece of paper. In this month’s podcast episode, we’re talking about costly tales of claim construction fails. This is the final episode in a three-part series focused on the fundamentals of patent claims and claim construction.

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For decades, conventional wisdom had most of us believing that automation and the inevitable rise of the machines would upend blue-collar industries first. But then AI had something to say about all of that. From passing medical licensing exams to writing code to even acing the Uniform Bar Examination, AI has become society’s latest (and perhaps most capable!) change agent in the professional workplace. At an astonishing pace, it’s erasing all assumptions as to what industries will be most impacted. With the most recent advancements centering around the understanding and generation of text and images – the core ingredients to patents – it’s becoming abundantly clear that patent practitioners and inventors are far from immune to AI’s effects and reach.

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What would you have been without a role model? What would you have done had you not known your career path was even an option? The answers to these career and life-defining questions often come down to exposure, access, and whether or not we could picture ourselves doing something in the first place. I doubt there are many readers on here who are not regularly awe-inspired by the incredible work of the inventors we’re fortunate to know and serve. There are few nobler or more important professions. While we already know this and possibly take that knowledge for granted, our future depends on as many kids as possible – from as many backgrounds as possible – being inspired by, and personally identifying with, this world-shaping path. Our special guest in this month’s episode, James Howard, is taking on that challenge.

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