Posts Tagged: "IIPCC"

On May 9th I attended the International IP Commercialization Council (IIPCC) USA Chapter second annual program at the United States Capitol.  The topic of the event was Meeting the Threat to America’s Economic Future: US IP & Innovation Policy where representatives from IBM, Qualcomm, Personalized Media Communications, the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Michigan, as well as a Who’s Who of IP Leaders and policymakers, shared their real-world perspectives on the state of the US Patent System, and the effects it has and will have on the economy. 

Somewhere near the end of 2011, I responded to an ad that was left on Craigslist. A website called IPWatchdog.com was looking for a writer to contribute content on Apple’s patenting activities… Over the past five years, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be an inventor in today’s patent system. I’ve learned that, unless you have the deep wallets to create advocacy groups which beat the drums for further patent reforms in service to the efficient infringer lobby, you tend to get railroaded by the system… In short, I’ve learned that the United States of today is not the same country where the famed garage inventor can become a business success thanks to hard work and ingenuity. Today, the true beneficiaries of innovation seem to be those well-entrenched interests who can copy without great fear of reprisal, leaving the actual inventors without any true ability to commercialize and profit from their intellectual property.

The pressure to adhere to the patent troll rhetoric was difficult for people to grasp if they don’t live within Silicon Valley, Causevic noted. He noted a conference which he was invited to speak at which changed its title from “Have We Gone Too Far in Weakening Our Patent System?” to “Where Are We in Eradicating Weak Patents?”, a radical shift in focus. “The pressure is very personal,” Causevic said, citing a paper he had worked on which found that company directors were often pressured against telling shareholders to monetize their patents as it could hurt their chances at employment with an anti-patent tech firm later on. As Taylor would add, this pressure affects the “tens of thousands of little companies started by entrepreneurs” in that region which live under a cultural overhang created by the large Silicon Valley entities.

The true agenda of those who support further reform of the U.S. patent system is as follows: to discriminate against entities which license technologies instead of manufacture; to increase the costs of asserting patent rights to the detriment of individuals and startups; and to stilt the conversations surrounding tech licensing in favor of the infringer bringing a product to market. “If you trip over our patent, you’re a thief. If we trip over your patent, you’re a troll,” Giancarlo said… “Let’s call patent reform for what it is: a blatant economic and power grab by tech firms to infringe on technology created by others,” Giancarlo said. In his opinion, the true trolls are the entities trolling Congress to get a competitive advantage over smaller entities.

Typically, the reform debate over the U.S. patent system features smaller players, but America’s largest tech firms also have issues with the patent system, which go way beyond any single company’s ability to sustain success… Leading off the panel’s remarks was Manny Schecter, chief patent counsel for IBM, who noted that innovation is a risk-bearing operation. “The likelihood that you ever make an investment [into research & development] is based on the return you anticipate on getting in that investment,” Schecter said. Any reduction to the anticipated return caused by uncertainty in IP policy discourages R&D investment. Schecter added that one of the ways in which intellectual property promotes innovation is by preventing others from taking innovations which are not their own. “We want to minimize or control uncertainty in the IP space if we want to maintain an IP surplus and promote the viability of the economy,” he said.

At the same time that America’s business climate has become too acidic for a vast majority of domestic startups, the nation has also been losing its place in the global supply chain while other major global economies, like China’s, are becoming increasingly self-reliant… This report identifies trending emerging tech like virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, smart robots, gesture control devices, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants, as well as consumer expectation levels and the length of time until the emerging tech becomes fully commercializable. As Aronoff noted, much of the innovation in those sectors relies on software. “Is that even protectable anymore?” Aronoff asked… With the new patent enforcement gauntlet in the U.S., what does it really take for a small company to protect its IP in the current system?

Former Cisco CTO, Charles Henery Giancarlo, explained that it was understood that individuals would not be able to manufacture and would need to license their rights to others. “It was specifically contemplated that this would engender a licensing industry with respect to patents.” Indeed, Phelps would later point out that 70% of early U.S. inventors did not even graduate high school. Thus, the founding fathers purposefully set up a system that had unique attributes: “it was cheap so everyone could use it,” Phelps explained. And the founding fathers also knew that the patent system they were creating would lead to individuals obtaining patents on their inventions and those individuals would not be able to manufacture, but would instead license those rights to others. But today “patents are suddenly pro-competitive only if you are a manufacturer,” Self explained.

“The results from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board reflect the procedures it applies, and in my judgment the procedures are wildly off base,” Judge Michel explained… “We’ve had PTAB final results… whatever the intentions were we don’t have to speculate… we have ample evidence of how it worked in practice. We know it doesn’t work satisfactorily.” *** “I don’t think things are really getting much better,” Kappos said. “We are in what I refer to as the leaky life raft.” When you are stranded and a leaky life raft comes along it looks great, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is still a leaky life raft. “The best you can say about 101 is that it has stabilized in a terrible space.”