Posts in Technology & Innovation

The strength of many of today’s most valuable companies is based significantly on intangible assets, like trademarks, patents, trade secrets and brand reputation. Hard-assets or “tangibles,” like real estate and equipment, are a relative blip on many large businesses value radar. What is surprising is the extent to which these companies are dominated by intangible assets and what that means for how they are understood and financed.

On remand from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) on Thursday reaffirmed its decision that The Broad Institute, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President and Fellows of Harvard College (“Broad”) were the first inventors of the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in eukaryotic cells.

A panel on day three of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 offered the IP community a candid look at how large operating companies actually evaluate and respond to patent assertions. The answers carry direct implications for every practitioner advising clients on the sell side of a transaction. The session, titled The Big Tech View on Patents and the Patent Market, featured Russell Binns (Allied Security Trust (AST)), Ola Adekunle (Google), Caroline Pinkston (Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)), and Dean Geibel (Samtec).

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet conducted its first oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the second Trump Administration. The harshest lines of questioning for USPTO Director John Squires during the hearing were reserved for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to reform rules of practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as well as President Trump’s political influence at the agency. During the hearing, Squires also confirmed that the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) would soon be revived, following an offer to join PPAC extended last night to an undisclosed independent inventor.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruling that internet service provider Cox Communications, Inc., is not contributorily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement. In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Thomas, the Court held that a service provider is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only when it intended for its service to be used in that way, which is established only if the provider either encouraged the infringement or designed the service specifically to facilitate it.

In the final session of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 on Tuesday, March 24, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Deputy Director Coke Morgan Stewart had a conversation with IPWatchdog Founder and CEO Gene Quinn in which she confirmed the Office is paying attention to the recent surge in ex parte reexamination filings and also said she is “optimistic” that the pending Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) will be finalized. 

Nearly every operating company valued at greater than $20 billion in market capitalization is likely to be accused of patent infringement at some point. The high likelihood of utilizing another person or company’s patented technology led to an explosion of patent litigation activity over the last 30 years. Often, inventions emerge without a specific product in mind, and the strategy for the invention-turned-patent lacks a clear vision. This has been the way of invention since the patent offices were first formed and legal IP protection became a constitutionally ordained government program.

A panel on day one of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 didn’t mince words: the voluntary patent licensing ecosystem is functionally broken, and the IP community needs to understand why. That was the diagnostic consensus from the panel titled Patent Dealmaking, Monetization & Licensing: An Examination of Capital, Risk, and Deal Flow, moderated by Brian O’Shaughnessy (Dinsmore & Shohl) and featuring Michael Gulliford (Soryn IP Capital), Louis Carbonneau (Tangible IP), and Dan Kesack (WTW Insurance).

Although I am not an attorney, I have been deeply enmeshed in the patent process as an inventor for three decades. And I have grown an appreciation for your profession that is perhaps deeper than most folks’. The majority of my work over the past 30 years has been in AI and machine learning. And I want to share some thoughts with you today about how all of this intersects and how you, everyone in this room, are really the last line of defense that humanity has in maintaining what it means to be human. 

As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across both commercial and government sectors, traditional contracting frameworks are being stretched beyond their limits. That tension was the focus of a panel at IPWatchdog Live 2026 today, featuring Judge Ryan T. Holte of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims; Stephanie Curcio, co-founder and CEO of NLPatent; and TJ Whittle, Legal Counsel at Anduril Industries.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list denying a petition for writ of certiorari filed by inventor Noah Healy to challenge rulings upholding a patent examiner’s subject matter eligibility rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Healy’s pro se petition challenged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision to affirm the examiner’s rejection as violating the meaningful review requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) due to conflicting statutory theories on patentability that were never sufficiently explained by the agency.

On day one of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026, panelists discussed the global IP landscape, the economics of patent portfolios, patent dealmaking and the ins and outs of drug patent critiques, before U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Pauline Newman and Retired CAFC Judge Paul Michel introduced the recipients of their respective eponymous awards for 2026.

As discussed in my prior article, the growing adoption and sophistication of assistive AI tools for patent prosecution are paving the way for material business and career impacts, such as decreased prosecution revenue and reduced staffing over the long term. Despite these potential risks, practitioners and enterprises may experience widely differing outcomes due to their client mix, expertise, and capacity to navigate shifting winds to advantage.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today released its 2026 International IP Index, which flagged concerning trends about the “growing erosion of IP leadership” among the world’s high-performing economies, according to the report’s authors. In particular, the report noted that scores in eight EU Member States have declined this year, although the top ten rankings remained the same from 2025. The United States was again number one, with a relatively stable score of 95.15% compared with last year’s 95.17%.