Posts Tagged: "Capitol Hill"

Today, April 3, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held a hearing titled Trailblazers and Lost Einsteins: Women Inventors and the Future of American Innovation—a topic that also was considered last Wednesday by the House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet in their first hearing of the term. The House hearing was titled, Lost Einsteins: Lack of Diversity in Patent Inventorship and the Impact on America’s Innovation Economy and, like today’s Senate hearing, focused on a recent report on female inventorship released by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and featured testimony on how to improve rates of female inventorship from a collection of women in fields having strong ties to the U.S. patent system. Susie Armstrong, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Qualcomm, Inc., said that, for companies like hers that were trying to take the lead in 5G mobile networks and other areas of innovation, more great tech minds from underrepresented communities were needed. An inventor herself who helped create single packet data communications that allowed cell phones to access the Internet for the first time, Armstrong said that Qualcomm had produced educational initiatives like the Thinkabit Lab, which partners with school districts and libraries to encourage students to innovate in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector.

This week on Capitol Hill will include a series of hearings related to tech and innovation topics on Tuesday at the House of Representatives, where debate will focus on the 2020 budget for NASA and the National Institutes of Health, as well as on technology issues at Veterans Affairs. Senate hearings will take a look at Alzheimer’s research and funding for the Department of Energy. On Wednesday, the Senate IP Subcommittee will hold a hearing to look at gender diversity issues in the U.S. patent system. Elsewhere in D.C., the Cato Institute will look at Medicare drug pricing issues, a topic which has increasingly included discussion of patents, and the American Enterprise Institute will consider consumer data privacy issues in a two-hour event featuring officials from the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Karyn Temple is appointed Register of Copyrights; the International Trade Commission recommends excluding certain iPhone models for infringing Qualcomm patent claims; the EU approves new copyright rules which will affect online media platforms; Senators Tillis and Coons move forward with stakeholder discussions on a legislative fix to Section 101 of patent law; Peloton responds to copyright infringement suit by dropping online cycling classes; Amazon adds nearly 1,000 jobs in Austin, TX; the District of Delaware tosses out willful infringement claims against Intel; and Oracle files opposition asking Supreme Court to deny a petition for writ filed by Google.

Over the last 15 years, Congress, the courts and the USPTO have gutted the patent system. Fortunately, USPTO Director Andrei Iancu has been taking important steps to reverse some of the damage, with revised 101 guidance and changes in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). But the most important thing Iancu is doing is silencing the big tech “patent troll” narrative. False political narratives condense complicated issues into an object and then villainize the object. Once a villain is created, its evil can be expanded to encompass anything you don’t like. When you have pushed enough bad stuff into the moniker, you can simply state its evil name, add a few campaign contributions, and Congress will magically pass laws in your favor to kill the villain. The “patent troll” narrative has been valuable to big tech. It bought the laws they needed to perpetuate their monopolies. With Iancu silencing the “patent troll” narrative, big tech created a new one: “bad patents”.

There is little doubt that the way intellectual property is viewed and protected has transformed over the last 12 years, at least in the eyes of those who strategically appreciate both the importance and limitations of rights available today. Once upon a time, corporations would seek to patent as much innovation as possible, working to obtain gargantuan patent portfolios. These gargantuan patent portfolios often provided protection in numbers, and not necessarily in quality. But with the Supreme Court becoming more interested in patents since 2007, and with decisions in KSR, Bilski, Myriad, Mayo and Alice, many of these gigantic portfolios were reduced to rubble. There were several very large technology companies that led the charge both in the courts and on Capitol Hill to change U.S. patent laws in a way that many believed would weaken patent rights and ultimately the patent grant itself. These companies enjoyed tremendous success, and today, U.S. patent laws simply do not look anything like they did a mere 12 years ago. This became indisputably clear last year when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Oil States and said that a patent is merely a government franchise, which shocked many observers.

IPWatchdog’s most recent Patent Masters™ Symposium, held Monday and Tuesday March 25-26 in Washington, D.C., examined the state of the U.S. patent system and how we arrived here. Some concluded that Congress, rather than the courts, must take action to resolve the many conflicts that presently exist in the muddled judicial approach to patents that has been developed over the last two decades or the U.S. patent system will become irrelevant. While the mainstream narrative traditionally has held that patents impede innovation by making access to technology too difficult or expensive, the narrative that unfolded over the two days of discussions with some of the leading legal experts in the field told quite an opposite tale. Institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic are closing up their diagnostics shops due to uncertainty around Section 101 law in that area, and small businesses are unable to secure funding due to the many risks and expenses surrounding patent enforcement in a post-America Invents Act environment. These developments demonstrate that patents are vital to economic prosperity and that weak patents result in medical and other technologies simply not being made here. Many of the Masters lamented the fact that China and Europe currently have more reliable patent systems than the United States, precisely because those countries have begun to copy the previous U.S. approach, while we stray farther away from it. Alden Abbott, General Counsel of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, delivered a keynote speech in which he emphasized that uncertainty around the ability to obtain patents is also harming the U.S. competitive process.

On March 14, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), respectively the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, sent a letter addressed to Karyn Temple, Acting Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office expressing concerns that Tillis and Coons share about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC. As the letter from Sens. Tillis and Coons notes, it takes an average of about six months for the Copyright Office to fully process registration applications. Given that the Supreme Court has now ruled that these applications must be fully processed prior to the filing of a suit, Senators Tillis and Coons said the real impact of the Fourth Estate decision “will be the extended unlawful exploitation of a copyright owner’s intellectual property.”

This week on Capitol Hill, the House IP Subcommittee convenes its first hearing of the 116th Congress to discuss a recent report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on female inventors, and various other House subcommittees will convene hearings to discuss 2020 budget requests for the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Defense. In the Senate, there are hearings scheduled to look at government oversight of electronic health records as well as cybersecurity issues related to small businesses. In the middle of the week, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation will host events that will explore proactive strikes by companies against cyber attackers, as well as how immigration issues are affecting STEM fields. The week closes out with a Brookings Institution event looking at consumer data privacy issues and policy reactions from around the world.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Supreme Court asks for the U.S. Solicitor General’s view on whether patents that claim a method of medically treating a patient automatically satisfy Section 101; a jury gives Qualcomm a win in its ongoing patent battle with Apple; the World Intellectual Property Office announces record-breaking totals for international patent applications and cybersquatting actions; Cisco avoids a nearly $60 million damages award at the Federal Circuit; McDonald’s appeals its loss in the EU over its Big Mac trademark; Tesla files trade secret lawsuits against former employees; Peloton faces a copyright suit from music publishers who are seeking $150 million; and Google gets another billion-dollar-plus fine from antitrust regulators in the EU.

The original motivation for the Bayh-Dole Act was to encourage the commercialization of academic innovation so that new technologies could be available for the benefit of all. Yet today, I feel compelled to call attention to a compliance landscape that is significantly different than that of the past four decades—one that could have dire consequences for institutions if they choose to be complacent. Not only do sponsoring agencies have an interest in how tech transfer complies with Bayh-Dole regulations, other entities have entered the competitive landscape looking for opportunities to turn lack of compliance to their advantage. In just the past two years we’ve seen a spike in requests for the government to exercise march-in rights by a variety of non-governmental advocacy groups (NGOs). These NGOs are staffed by PhDs who are well-versed in the academic tech transfer ecosystem and they actively seek out pockets of non-compliance. An attempt is then made to extricate key technologies using non-compliance as a lever and the NGOs become the primary influence on how innovation is put into the marketplace. I would ask the question, “Who will pick up on these inventions?” If you follow this chain of events we may find ourselves in a situation where innovation is not freely available to all (the original intent of Bayh-Dole) but an endpoint where NGOs and their backers control how technologies get into the marketplace.

With congress out of session this week, it is a good time to meet the members of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, which—unlike the Senate IP Subcommittee—has not yet convened this term. While the House may be largely preoccupied with issues outside the IP realm thus far, other House committees and subcommittees have been actively debating a number of topics relevant to IP. The 116th Congress brings both new and old faces to the Subcommittee with varying levels of IP knowledge and activity. Many of its members, such as Hakeem Jeffries and Zoe Lofgren, are well-versed in IP issues, starting with the full Judiciary Committee Chairman, Jerrold Nadler.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 13, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held an oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office featuring testimony from and questioning of USPTO Director Andrei Iancu. While this hearing was relatively short by Congressional standards, the Senate IP Subcommittee explored recent changes instituted during Iancu’s tenure as USPTO Director and also got into the debate on pharmaceutical patents—a topic that has been front and center for both houses of Congress in recent weeks.

Representative Steve Stivers (R-OH) and Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) introduced the Support Technology & Research for Our Nation’s Growth and Economic Resilience (STRONGER) Patents Act, which would in part restore injunctive relief as a remedy for patent infringement, in the U.S. House of Representatives in March of last year. While there has been much talk about closed-door discussions taking place on Capitol Hill recently around fixing Section 101 law, the House has not yet re-introduced the STRONGER Patents Act, and has thus far been focused on other issues this term. But Rep. Stivers seems confident that the Act has a chance this term, and says that this could be the consensus legislation the House needs. Read below for more on Rep. Stivers’ thoughts about patent reform in the 116th Congress, where the America Invents Act went wrong, and how we ensure the U.S. patent system is restored to number one.

This week in Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill is silent due to district work periods for the House of Representatives and state work periods for the Senate. However, the nation’s capital is still very busy with a collection of think tank events related to innovation and technology. A pair of events at New America looks at how technology and social media can stem the tide of extremist ideologies or how advances in DNA testing can help solve cold cases. Cybersecurity challenges at the next Summer Olympic Games are the topic of discussion at the Wilson Center. The Heritage Foundation also hosts a pair of events looking at how the Constitutional Framers viewed property and issues with China-based Huawei’s dominance in 5G. Closing out the week is a Friday event at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation exploring challenges to the U.S. Postal Service in the e-commerce era.

The data shows that Section 101 allowances at the USPTO are on the rise after a long period of decline, but the 101 situation still remains “alarming,” said panelists during IPWatchdog’s webinar—”A Tale of Different Software Innovations: The Uneven Impact of Alice”—last Thursday, March 7. While Congress is currently considering ways to address the patent eligibility problem, the likelihood of a legislative fix this year is slim, said Bob Stoll of Drinker Biddle. “I believe we will see introduction of legislation on 101 as early as this summer, but I don’t anticipate anything being enacted,” Stoll said. “There’s a lot more going on to occupy their interests on the Hill.”