Posts Tagged: "Andrei Iancu"

On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Trade convened a hearing titled Maintaining American Innovation and Technology Leadership, which explored a host of regulatory and other legal burdens being placed on tech industry trade by foreign governments to the detriment of American innovators and consumers. Among the panel witnesses at the subcommittee hearing was former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, who spoke to several ways that our nation’s adversaries and trading partners alike are weakening American IP rights and how those issues should be addressed by U.S. policymakers.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we dive into patent eligibility waters, with a discussion on how patent attorneys and litigators alike can cope with Alice. Our conversation will triangulate patent eligibility from the political perspective, from the perspective of a patent litigator who represents patent owners in federal court, and from the perspective of a patent attorney who represents clients as they attempt to obtain software patents. Joining us this week is the Honorable Andrei Iancu, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Vince Rubino, who is a patent litigator with Fabricant in the firm’s New York City office, and from the patent prosecution perspective we have John Rogitz, who is Managing Attorney at Rogitz & Associates.

Today, former U.S. Patent and Trademark Director Andrei Iancu delivered a keynote address to open the Intellectual Property Awareness Summit (IPAS) 2025 being held at Dolby Labs in San Francisco, CA. Iancu’s comments excoriated recent calls to weaken U.S. intellectual property laws for the purpose of devaluing American intellectual property (IP), a political viewpoint that he said cedes economic and technological dominance to foreign rivals like China.

On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters (UIPM), Andrei Iancu, who served as Director of the USPTO, 2018-2021, discusses how the government should regulate AI, how President Trump may think about IP rights in his second term, and how the current congressional bills could impact the patent landscape.

On the final day of IPWatchdog LIVE 2024, Gene and Renee Quinn celebrated the organization’s 25th anniversary with the IPWatchdog team and attendees of LIVE. In a surprise ceremony, Gene Quinn was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by his alma mater, the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Franklin Pierce Law School, for his service to and work with the IP community.

On May 28, a group of five former Directors, Deputy Directors and Patent Commissioners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) sent a letter addressed to current USPTO Director Kathi Vidal in opposition to a rule package on terminal disclaimer practice proposed earlier this month. This group of highly-ranking former government officials join a growing chorus of voices who are concerned by the apparent overreach of the nation’s patent granting agency into substantive rulemaking that would create enforceability issues for companies making use of terminal disclaimers to obtain patent rights.

Former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu and retired U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Kathleen O’Malley are joining the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, respectively. Both O’Malley and Iancu are presently with Irell & Manella. The two are also members of the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP)—Iancu is Chairman of the Board and O’Malley is a Board Member.

Former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Andrei Iancu, who is now a partner with Irell & Manella, told attendees of an Orrin G. Hatch Foundation webinar today that many of the proposals in the USPTO’s recent Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practices should be legislated by Congress. Particularly on issues that were statutorily prescribed, such as the standard patents are reviewed under at the PTAB versus the courts, the timing for filing petitions, and who can bring an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding, Iancu said the better route to certainty is through Congress.

In a webinar hosted today by the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), the organization’s founders, Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, both former Directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), spoke with former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, about the increased skepticism surrounding a plan to extend the waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics. According to Kappos, while World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries were supposed to decide on December 17 whether to extend the waiver, “given the rising opposition and other countries starting to raise their hands” with questions, “it’s seeming likely the WTO will defer its decision until the New Year.”

On Wednesday night, during a launch event for the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) announced that he has come on as a co-sponsor of the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2022. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the first draft of his bill in August, but had no co-sponsors at the time, which caused some to question the chances of the bill passing anytime soon. But tonight, Coons said he is happy to be a co-sponsor and both Coons and Tillis seemed optimistic about the prospects for intellectual property legislation in the next congress—no matter which of them ends up as Chair.

A new intellectual property (IP) organization launched today will be headed by former vice president of U.S. policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC), Frank Cullen, and features a Board of Directors comprised of bipartisan frontrunners in the IP realm. The Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) will aim to educate on the importance of innovation to the U.S. economy at a high level, and to fill the void its creators say exists with respect to clarifying the often-negative public narrative about the role of IP in access to innovation. The Board includes former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, Retired U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Kathleen O’Malley and Retired CAFC Chief Judge Paul Michel.

In consultation with Chief Judge Paul Michel, IPWatchdog is pleased to announce that Andrei Iancu, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, and current partner at Irell & Manella, has been selected as the 2022 recipient of The Paul Michel Award. He will be presented with the award on Sunday evening, September 11, 2022, at IPWatchdog LIVE 2022. The Paul Michel Award, created with the blessing of Chief Judge Paul Michel (CAFC, ret.), is awarded annually to someone within the IP community who has selflessly served the best interests of the industry and its members as a respected leader, mentor, and advocate on behalf of fairness and for the best interests of the intellectual property system.

The third day of IPWatchdog’s PTAB Masters™ 2022 featured more from former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, as well as panels covering topics such as avoiding obviousness mistakes, appellate strategies from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and other intricacies of PTAB practice from the experts. Panelists this afternoon also weighed in on today’s announcement that Justice Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court, opening the door for Biden to appoint a replacement.

The first panel of Tuesday’s PTAB Masters™ 2022, titled “Discretionary Denials: Has the WDTX Been Neutered?”, presented data that reveals the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) seemingly stopped citing Fintiv as a reason to discretionarily deny inter partes review (IPR) proceedings for cases with parallel litigation in the Western or Eastern Districts of Texas (WD of TX/ ED of TX) during the last four months of 2021. While the PTAB issued a larger number of institution decisions overall in those months compared with previous months, and a larger number of cases citing Fintiv, there was also a relatively low number of cases across all jurisdictions in which discretion to deny was applied based on the Fintiv analysis.