Posts Tagged: "ethics"

This proposed rule package adopts most ABA provisions wholesale or with minor revisions and codifies many professional responsibility obligations that already apply to the practice of law. Specifically, the proposed rules will streamline practitioners’ professional responsibility obligations, bringing USPTO obligations in line with most practitioners’ state bar requirements. The package also proposes to eliminate the annual practitioner maintenance fee.

The theme of the annual meeting of the AIPF this year is “intellectual property as a corporate asset.” There are indeed presentations sprinkled across the two days of this meeting that relate specifically to this topic. Another recurring and equally treated topic is the use of the Internet in practice in a variety of contexts — attracting clients, networking generally and use of the Internet for investigations. Topics of particular interest included: (1) The Invisible Hand: Models for Monetizing Patents in the 21st Century; (2) Lies, Damn Lies, and Lawyers; (3) Contingent Fee Arrangements in Enforcing IP Rights; and (4) Economic Effect of Non Practicing Entities.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced today that it will publish final rules in the Federal Register on Tuesday, July 31, 2012, that relate to the statute of limitations provisions for disciplinary actions brought by the Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) at the USPTO. Subsection (e) is added to clarify that the one year period for filing a complaint may be tolled by a written agreement between the involved practitioner and the OED Director. The Office agrees that tolling agreements may provide both the Office and the practitioner with additional time to resolve matters without a complaint.

In the situation where there is a joint research collaboration everything is fine, people are happy and hope springs eternal right up until that moment when everything falls apart. Then you have issues associated with a law firm representing inventors of a joint collaboration might be conflicted out of the representation altogether because downstream patent applications filed by one or more of the collaborators creates a situation where the collaborators no longer have jointly aligned interests, perhaps as the result of double patenting issues. Ware explained several cases arising out of a common set of facts whereby multiple joint collaborators were not consulted on the filing of a joint application (or at least not enough to their liking), which created a double patenting issue for an after filed application. The law firm representing the collective was sued for malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty; the case settled.

The fact that the outsourcing of patent searches and the preparation of patent applications violates U.S. law only makes perfect sense, particularly when you factor into consideration the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 181 (re: national security) and 35 U.S.C. 184 (re: foreign filing licenses). By openly and willingly tolerating the outsourcing of preparation work of patent applications the clear intention of 35 U.S.C. 181 is subverted. What good does a secrecy order make if the the information relative to the invention has already been sent overseas?

After 1 hour and 40 minutes I had hardly covered one-third of my questions, and I think you will see that we had a very lively discussion about many things, including Judge Michel’s investigation of President Nixon during Watergate, his investigation of Members of Congress during Koreagate, judicial ethics, working for Arlen Spector when he was a District Attorney and then again as a Senator, patent reform, the Patent Office, where things seemed to go out of control for the US patent system and much more. We even talked about Bilski v. Kappos, KSR v. Teleflex and how the patent system is tilting against independent inventors, start-ups and universities.

You just couldn’t make this stuff up. A team of humans creates genetically altered and a self-replicating synthetic cell using a computer. I suspect that computer was running some pretty powerful and sophisticated software. So the anti-patent crowd should be sufficiently whipped into a frenzy over this story top to bottom. It hits all the hot button issues, life, genetics, software, ethics and it rolls them all into one. But while we might relish the anguish of those in the anti-patent community, this type of scientific advance should not be taken lightly because it has the potential to fire up those with an anti-patent agenda and could also fire up religious groups as well. The coming together of such strange bedfellows would result in an alliance with enormous political power. So innovators need to pay attention and be vigilant.