Gene Quinn

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Rama Elluru, a former PTAB Judge turned national security policy advisor. We explore the accelerating intersection of AI, patent law, and national competitiveness, as well as the hard questions policymakers will soon face around AI-assisted inventorship, patent eligibility, drug discovery, scientific research, and whether existing legal frameworks can keep pace with technologies that are advancing far faster than Congress, agencies, and courts typically move. We also address the broader national security implications of intellectual property policy, AI-enabled fraud, workforce disruption, the need for guardrails and meaningful penalties for malicious uses of AI, and why IP must be understood as a core pillar of economic and national security strategy.

Imagine a company spends millions of dollars constructing a new office building in a prime downtown location. The company pays for maintenance, utilities, insurance, landscaping, repairs, security, and taxes. The building is well designed, professionally managed, and expensive to maintain. But it sits empty. No tenants. No leases. No revenue. That would strike most executives as irrational. Yet many companies treat patent portfolios in exactly the same way. They spend millions building and maintaining patent portfolios around the world. But when asked what revenue the portfolio generates, the silence is deafening.

Managing patent portfolios requires investment. There are significant costs associated with both building and maintaining patent portfolios, but all too often only a fraction of their potential business impact is ever realized. While obtaining and maintaining weak patents is a real concern, the strength of any particular patent, family or portfolio is not always tied to overall strength. Frequently, the problem is that the organization does not really know what it owns, why it owns what it does own, where patents fit from a strategic perspective, and whether the assets can be credibly used to support any commercial outcome.

For much of the last four decades, American innovation policy has rested on a premise that should be obvious but too often is not: strong intellectual property rights are not an obstacle to competition. Quite the opposite—strong IP rights are the precursor to robust competition. The alternative to a robust patent system is not some frictionless utopia of open competition. The alternative is secrecy, copying, and underinvestment. If patents are too weak, companies will rely more heavily on trade secrets. That means less disclosure, less technical diffusion, and fewer opportunities for others to build upon what has been invented. Weak patents do not democratize innovation—they often bury it. Weak patents also reward copycats who find it far more expedient and financially rewarding to take rather than to innovate themselves. These truths were the main point at the center of my recent conversation with Alden Abbott, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and former General Counsel of the Federal Trade Commission.

Most patent portfolios are overbuilt and under-managed. That is not a criticism of any particular company or patent department. It is simply the predictable result of how patent portfolios are created. Companies innovate. Business leaders demand more filings. Engineers generate invention disclosures. Outside counsel prosecute applications. Patents issue. Then years pass, products change, markets move on, competitors pivot, and strategic priorities evolve. Often—if not frequently—the patent portfolio remains the same, as if legacy assumptions and strategy remain relevant even though they no longer match business or market realities.