Posts Tagged: "innovation"

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Friday, August 8, sent a letter to Harvard University President Alan Garber informing him that the U.S. government is planning to “march in” on its patents. Lutnick accused the institution of failing “to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer” and being “in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents.” As a result, the Commerce Department will be “initiating an immediate comprehensive review of the compliance—or lack thereof—of Harvard’s federally funded research programs,” wrote Lutnick.

Pharmaceutical companies were dealt back-to-back blows over the last 24 hours in their fight against the Biden-era Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, which the Trump Administration has continued. In one decision, published today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a district court’s judgment that dismissed all of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.’s constitutional claims.

Fintiv, Inc. has filed a complaint against Apple, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division, alleging “corporate theft and racketeering of monumental proportions” due to Apple’s misappropriation of Fintiv’s mobile wallet technology. Fintiv’s complaint charges that Apple blatantly stole its trade secrets for mobile wallet technology from Fintiv’s predecessor, CorFire, under pressure to develop a mobile digital wallet and an inability to do so on its own.

Thank you for inviting Senator Tillis’ office to participate in this listening session. Panelists were asked to address an issue impacting drug affordability and accessibility. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts. America’s robust intellectual property framework, most notably our patent system, is essential to fostering investments in pharmaceutical innovation and to ensuring accessibility of those medicines to benefit patients and society, both in the short and long terms. Concerns regarding drug affordability are important – as are the efforts to strengthen the patent system to ensure continued innovation now and well into the future.

The Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) today issued a statement taking Congress to task for supporting a bill introduced in July that would limit the ability of patent owners to assert more than one patent from the same “Patent Group” in a patent infringement action, with the goal of addressing so-called patent thickets.

Late last week, President Donald Trump sent letters to 17 pharmaceutical companies pressing them to deliver on his May Executive Order 14297, titled “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.” Trump gave the companies 60 days to extend Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing to all Medicaid patients, for newly launched drugs, to return increased revenues from negotiations with countries to American patients, and to provide for direct purchasing options to patients at MFN rates.

Last week, reports surfaced that spokespeople from the European Commission had confirmed the official withdrawal of legislative draft proposals that would have increased the European Union’s (EU) regulatory oversight over both standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing and civil liability of artificial intelligence (AI) products and services. While the decision to abandon these proposals was first made public this February, the EU Commission’s official withdrawal underscores ongoing tensions between the tech lobby and consumer advocates in the AI sector.

Under current law, only natural persons can be inventors on a patent. But as AI systems become more sophisticated and domain-specific, questions emerge about whether the creators of such AI might contribute to the conception of inventions generated with their tools. Consider this scenario: a scientific researcher uses a highly specialized AI model (designed for, say, molecular drug design) to discover a new pharmaceutical compound. The human runs the model, evaluates outputs, and files a patent application claiming the new compound. Is the AI’s developer – who trained and fine-tuned the model to solve such molecular design problems – a silent joint inventor of that compound?

In a recent letter sent to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick,18 Republican Senators asked the Trump Administration to use trade negotiations to lower drug prices for U.S. citizens and also called for the administration to fill the vacant position of Chief Innovation and Intellectual Property Negotiator.  

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, we have a conversation about one of the hottest topics not just in the intellectual property world, but one that people are discussing both inside and outside of government. The cost of prescription pharmaceuticals is higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world, and many in the United States—including President Trump—are fed up with this imbalance. What makes drug pricing an intellectual property issue is the fact that those who do not like patents engage in a sophisticated and coordinated campaign to mislead the public into ignoring what really drives prices and instead blame patents. In other words—they lie.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump Administration is considering a major change to patent fees, which would charge patent holders somewhere between 1% to 5% of the overall value of the patent. Although the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is reportedly circulating draft proposals and financial models, no specific framework has been leaked. However, in addition to obvious valuation complexities that go beyond anything the USPTO currently does, if the Trump Administration is going to charge patent owners a percentage of the value of the patent, the most logical way to do so would be through dramatically increased maintenance fees.

Last week, Utah-based shoemaker HandsFree Licensing Labs (HFL) filed a lawsuit  in the Eastern District of Texas alleging claims of patent infringement against Skechers, the latest legal action against the California-based footwear company previously accused of copying innovations by several competitors. This latest suit alleges that Skechers’ Hands Free Slip-In technology, incorporated into more than one-third of the company’s total product lineup, has been misappropriated from HFL’s patented technology developed to improve footwear for the elderly and disabled.

The Trump Administration on Wednesday released a plan for keeping the United States competitive in the race to number one with respect to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Titled “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” the key policies would remove many of the restrictions on AI companies proposed by the Biden Administration’s AI plan, which was scrapped soon after Trump took office.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we explore the age-old question about whether it is best to keep an innovation as a trade secret or if it makes sense to seek patent protection. And while this question is not new, it is a question that has been getting more attention in recent years as patents in the United States become weaker, which makes trade secrets increasingly look like a viable alternative for a host of different innovations in a variety of technology fields. “I have a pretty easy formula that I use to balance the patent versus the trade secret [question],” Arash Behravesh said. “And that is, can it be reverse engineered? How much does it cost the competitor to reverse engineer it? And if we decide to keep it as a trade secret, how long will it be before somebody potentially discloses the information to the public?”

Thirty-one artists from across Europe posted videos today urging the EU Commission to “Stay True to the [AI] Act.” The slogan is part of a campaign that criticizes the EU’s implementation of the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which the campaign’s website says “should protect artists” but that the EU is instead “watering down the legislation – failing to hold AI companies to account.”