Posts Tagged: "famous inventors"

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I sat down with my business and life partner, Renee Quinn. In addition to telling Renee’s story about how she found her way into the intellectual property world, and through our sometimes-comical banter, we together explore what it really takes to build, sustain, and continuously reinvent an entrepreneurial company like IPWatchdog. What emerged was a practical roadmap for entrepreneurship, invention, navigating platform risk, and focused on the necessity of constantly being ready to pivot as old business models start to show signs of age and ultimately falter. From Renee’s journey from IP outsider to patented inventor, to firsthand lessons learned navigating Amazon’s reseller ecosystem, the discussion highlights how intellectual property operates in the real world, not the classroom.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with my friend Jason Harrier, former Chief Patent Counsel at Capital One and current co-founder and General Counsel of artificial intelligence (AI) company IP Copilot. I started our conversation by asking Harrier about invention harvesting, which I know from many conversations with in-house attorneys is one of the more difficult but critical important aspects of their job. We begin with a simple question: Why is invention harvesting so difficult and why are in-house attorneys always talking about in terms of what they tried in the past, what they are currently trying and what they hope to try in the future, sounding a little like Goldilocks looking for what is just right, but always out of reach.

If you are an inventor of a consumer product there are reputable companies looking for inventions and ideas to bring to market, and their business model is built on taking products to market over and over again, and they are in constant need of new products and improvements. They also realize litigation is wasteful when you are dealing with products that often have a 1-, 2- or 3-year shelf life, so they are willing to do deals that allow them to quickly get products onto shelves and into the stream of commerce, and inventors get paid.

On October 2, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced that Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries related to modified messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for use in vaccines. A critical part of the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines were not an effective option until the pioneering work of these two scientists, one of whom faced considerable rejection while laying the foundation that answered one of the world’s greatest public health crises.

Every once in a while, a new invention changes an industry and sometimes even the world. In grade school, we all learned about some of these great inventions – the cotton gin, the lightbulb, the telephone, etc. Today, like no time in history, we are witnessing an explosion of innovation in every facet of life. Many of these inventions change the way we live our lives. But most of today’s great inventions are hidden behind touch screens or in the bowel of data centers. They are often not well understood, nor well known.

As we celebrate World IP Day this week, the theme of which is “IP and SMEs [small and medium enterprises]”, we must remember that – from its founding – the United States’ economic success has depended on fostering an environment where innovators and entrepreneurs can dream big and achieve success. But that success is now at risk because our nation is lagging behind others in ensuring that everyone, everywhere, can access the most important tool of our time – the internet.

Inventor advocacy group US Inventor has filed an amicus brief in support of a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asking the justices to clarify “[w]hether the Federal Circuit’s “heavy presumption” line of cases or its “holistic” line should govern claim construction. The petition was filed in December by Akeva, LLC, owner of a portfolio of athletic footwear patents, and is an appeal from a July 2020 nonprecedential Federal Circuit decision, Akeva, LLC v. Nike, Inc. In that case, the Federal Circuit upheld a district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement to a number of defendants—including Asics, Nike, adidas America, Inc., New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc., and Puma North America, Inc.—finding in part that the district court had “correctly construed the claim term ‘rear sole secured’ to exclude conventional fixed rear soles.”

It has likely been a while since most of even used a pencil – but would we use them more if they grew flowers, trees and herbs? Enter, Sprout World, a company founded on the concept of sustainability that credits patents as playing a large part in its success. In late 2012, Michael Stausholm, the company’s founder, happened upon a Kickstarter campaign launched by three MIT students for a pencil one could use and then plant in the ground to grow flowers, herbs, vegetables and even trees. “I saw it and thought it was a wonderful idea,” Stausholm says. “I had been working in sustainability for many years and everyone was talking about it, but what was it actually? The pencil was a wonderful way of illustrating the concept.”

Naming the correct inventors is critical when drafting a U.S. patent. Patents must have all inventors properly named. Deciding who is an inventor is a complicated task and great care must be taken to not add or omit people who are not inventors. It is possible that failure to properly name the inventors could result in losing your patent or its value. If inventors have been improperly added or omitted, the patent must be corrected or it could be declared invalid.

Not too long ago, independent inventor Josh Malone finally received a settlement for willful infringement of his patents. He won in court and at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and from what I’ve read, I know it was a long, hard fight, and the cost to litigate was in the tens of millions of dollars. But, he did it, and his product Bunch O Balloons continues to be a number-one hit summer toy. Licensing his invention to one of the fastest growing toy companies in the world (ZURU) clearly had its advantages for Malone. But what about the rest of us independent inventors? For the last decade or so, the patent system has not been in favor of the independent inventor. But has it ever been? I don’t think so.

Patent litigation and enforcing patents can be cost prohibitive for many individual inventors and smaller businesses. Hourly rates at large firms may be out of reach for those with “not so deep pockets,” and most litigation funding companies either avoid patent litigation altogether or require a case valuation in the tens of millions of dollars. Enforcing your patent rights can be an expensive endeavor, but affordable options do exist.

This year has included many twists and turns for IP stakeholders, particularly on the patent side. Most recently, the Federal Circuit’s decision in Arthrex has called into question the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions, and perhaps the Board itself. Elsewhere, Congress has been—unsuccessfully—attempting to step in and clarify U.S. patent law since early in the year, while the courts have continued to muddy the waters of patent eligibility law. The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Qualcomm, and Judge Lucy Koh’s decision in the case, have further called into question the United States’ ability to compete on the innovation front going forward. And yet, there have been some wins in other areas this year, including at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and there remain many reasons to be hopeful about the year ahead. IPWatchdog asked some IP experts to share what they have to be thankful for on the IP front this Thanksgiving, despite all the uncertainty. Hopefully, as those of you who celebrate the holiday enjoy your Thanksgiving dinners, these sentiments will inspire you to be thankful too.

In August, the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the Northern District of California charged a pioneer of self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski, with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google under 18 U.S.C. § 1832 of the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). According to the indictment, Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 files containing critical information about Google’s autonomous-vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016. The indictment alleged that Levandowski then made an unauthorized transfer of the files to his personal laptop. Some of the files that Levandowski allegedly took from Google included private schematics for proprietary circuit boards and designs for light sensor technology, known as Lidar, which are used in self-driving cars. Levandowski joined Uber in 2016 after leaving Google when Uber bought his new self-driving trucking start-up, “Otto.” Levandowski has repeatedly asserted that he never disclosed the download, nor made use of the information while he was at Uber.

One of the more dramatic moments in my $20 million dollar patent brawl occurred in the pivotal preliminary injunction hearing at the courthouse in downtown Tyler, Texas. I learned that Walmart was coming to monitor the proceedings. I think they were curious to meet the crazy inventor who dared to sue the largest retailer on the planet. The proposal on the table was that I dismiss the suit with prejudice (i.e., drop the suit and waive all my rights) or else Walmart would never buy another product from my exclusive licensee, Zuru—no balloons, no robotic fish, no dart guns. Distraught, I hid in a side room and didn’t show for the meeting where my lawyers had advised me to capitulate. Curiosity heightened; the Walmart attorney unexpectedly suspended all demands and invited me to sit down and explain my point of view. I pointed to the infringing spiral-faced Battle Balloons and told her they were selling my invention without permission, thereby harming me and my family. The Walmart attorney was flummoxed and suggested that I didn’t understand how the patent system worked and was overreaching. Here I was claiming to have invented this apparatus that looked different than mine. It had a spiral face and mine was flat. This is the problem with our patent system; it is run by people who don’t understand invention. Think about it, we have to use this bizarre legal document not only to describe our discovery but to describe the boundaries of it. For inventors, there are no boundaries—why would we stop applying and extending our discoveries? We do our best to describe it, but in the end, non-inventors write and interpret the laws that determine our rights.