Posts Tagged: "Leahy-Smith AIA"

As Senior Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, Vishal Amin was a primary architect of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the administrative tribunal that has destroyed thousands of patents, destabilized the U.S. patent system, and sent venture capital and countless technology startups fleeing to China… He must explain his reasoning for the most damaging legislation to American innovation in U.S. history. These questions must be asked of Vishal Amin in his confirmation hearings. Unless he can reasonably and satisfactorily explain his position on these issues, it must be assumed he is not qualified for the position of White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.

The House Judiciary Committee will set the agenda for any intellectual property legislative reforms that will arise over the next two years during the 115th Congress, and the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet will take the lead for the full House Judiciary Committee. Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is once again Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and in that role will continue to have tremendous influence on any intellectual property related matters… At the start of the 114th Congress, Congressman Darrell Issa was made Chair of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. Despite being an inventor himself, the bombastic Issa has aligned himself with Google and other Silicon Valley elites. Issa is not viewed as a friend of independent inventors, and instead lambasts patents trolls as often as he can. While no one likes a patent troll, Issa has taken the unusual step to equate patent trolls with all patent owners who enforce their patents.

Congress sent H.R. 5, the House-passed Regulatory Accountability Separation of Powers Restoration Act, to the Senate’s Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee on January 12, 2017. When enacted it will overrule Chevron deference. This enactment will therefore shine the disinfecting sunlight of appellate review where it has not gone before…. Patent practitioners need to realize that the Act will eliminate stare decisis over earlier court approvals of specific Patent Office rules. First, after the Act, it will be an open question whether the Patent Office may use BRI within IPR proceedings. That is because the law will have changed over what deference a court must give Patent Office regulations. In Cuozzo, the Court cited Chevron in analyzing whether rulemaking imposing BRI on IPR proceedings constituted “a reasonable exercise of the rulemaking authority that Congress delegated to the Patent Office.” Cuozzo, 136 S. Ct. at 2144. After walking through a collection of policy rationales that made BRI seem “reasonable” to the majority, the Court concluded by explicitly noting that the “Patent Office’s regulation, selecting the broadest reasonable construction standard, is reasonable in light of the rationales described above. . . .” Id. at 2146.

The American patent system represents a delicate balance. On the one hand, the patent system provides an incentive to invest in risky technical problem solving by giving an inventor an “exclusive right” for a limited time. On the other hand, from the time of the first Patent Act in 1790, patent critics have argued that patents block competition with a temporary monopoly. This tension has, nevertheless, enabled the rise of the U.S. as a major industrial economy, particularly after the Civil War. Optimally, the patent system encourages inventors to take risks to invent and disclose new and useful things by investing in ex ante costs before a later payoff. After a limited time of exclusivity rights, a patented invention falls into the public sphere, thereby providing a public interest in the long run. Economic and technological progress proceeds by building on previous inventions. Until about 2006, the U.S. patent system worked well, as evident in the development of the largest and strongest economy in the world.

One thing you learn early on in the Conservative Movement is the maxim, Personnel Is Policy. For a new administration pledged to turn the ship of state to effect the goal of America’s economic and industrial restoration, the same turn must be made regarding intellectual property. And it’s hard to imagine that the Obama picks to lead the Patent and Trademark Office or the Copyright Office could be part of the solution in IP policy, if America is to be made great again.

First to File was just the beginning of the damage caused by the America Invents Act. When the concept of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is fully understood even more quit. Their American Dream goes up in smoke because bad legislation tilted the patent system in favor of large multinational corporations.

For a many years, the pied pipers of the anti-patent lobby whistled the patent troll melody and Congress, desperately in need of a glorious bipartisan victory, pushed and ultimately passed inventor killing legislation… For whatever reason, 2016 represented the year that Congress itself, or at least enough Members of Congress, got serious about considering the negative effects of pandering to the anti-patent lobby. Those effects are now clear and the stage is set to turn it back. Of course, we can anticipate there will be new pushes for patent reform in 2017 and beyond. Perhaps some of those attempts at patent reform will be from the pro-patent side, but we need to remain vigilant because the anti-patent lobby has not and will not go away.

Now that Trump has won, the discussion has narrowed to whether Trump will keep patents weak or make patents great again. From the outside perspective, it is a curious exercise to say the least… Why are we even asking these questions? Property is property, right? Can you remember an election where people were asking if their deed would keep squatters out of their living room depending on who won the presidency? I don’t. It seems a preposterous question. After all, the deed on your house is a property right and everybody knows the government will back it up and eject the squatters. So why then do we, or should we, have to ask whether a Trump Administration will be in favor of strong patent rights? It all seems bizarre to say the least.

The PTAB used the wrong standard to institute the CBM proceeding in the first place, which lead the Federal Circuit to vacate the PTAB decision and remand the case for further consideration by the PTAB – namely the application of the proper standard… As the Federal Circuit would point out later: “All patents, at some level, relate to potential sale of a good or service.” To allow this PTAB created standard that has no textual support in the statute to be applied would be to allow virtually any patent to be the subject of a CBM. That was clearly was not the intent of Congress and it would fly directly and unambiguously in the face of the explicit language of the statute. The PTAB is significantly limited in their power to institute a CBM.

Stifling innovation and curtailing investments are the effects of the AIA from what I see and hear. This is infuriating! It is disincentivizing inventors, innovators and investors! Before last year I have never been an activist or protested anything publically. The AIA issue has change that for me… We are standing to protect the rights of Americans to profit from their ideas. The patent system has been broken and rigged to suit corporations. Stealing IP is cheaper than developing it…

As more reports come out that patent filings for individuals and small businesses are down and a general recognition that real innovation does not come from large organizations, but rather small ones, it is becoming clearer that changes in our laws have decreased the previous standards that were in place to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” As such, it seems to this author that our current patent laws are unconstitutional, or at the very least are thoroughly and completely frustrating the constitutional purpose for which they were created since our laws are promoting less and not “securing” our discoveries. We need to strengthen our patent laws to have a system that promotes the progress of science and useful arts by efficiently and affordably securing for inventors the exclusive rights to their discoveries and innovations.

Perhaps the most challenging to accept is the notion that a tribunal created with a specific purpose of invalidation can be impartial to both the petitioners and the defendants. The AIA tribunal stands in contrast to the Court system, as their inherent mission is not to evaluate, but to challenge, contest, and invalidate. In addition, a “winners and losers” system, allowing one party to outspend the other, or to create joinders to outnumber the other, remains very damaging to the inventors, investors and small businesses.

As the above cases illustrate, PTAB decisions have affected district court cases in different ways. Determining whether the use of a PTAB decision is likely to be permitted or will have any effect requires a multifactorial analysis that considers at least the nature of the PTAB outcome (e.g., final or preliminary), factors contributing to that outcome (e.g., whether they were based on the merits of the case), and potential drawbacks attached to the requested use (e.g., jury confusion). Additional considerations might include, for example, the level of sophistication of the technology already being considered by the jury, which might factor into a court’s analysis of the likelihood of jury confusion. Parties seeking to rely on PTAB decisions in district court should consider these factors. The AIA has only been in place for five years and the law in this area will continue to develop over the next several years.

All of the post grant challenges ushered in by the America Invents Act (AIA) were a bad idea. They never should have been created in the first place. All the post grant proceedings have done is make infringing patents a more economical choice, while making it more costly for innovators to obtain and keep the protection they need to make innovating a worthwhile endeavor. It was all too predictable that a new tribunal would over assert its own jurisdiction, but the breadth of just how arbitrary, capricious and fundamentally unfair the process would be was simply not predictable.

Unfortunately, Mr. President, after five years I cannot report back that the AIA has yet ”improve[d] patent quality and help[ed] give entrepreneurs the protection and the confidence they need to attract investment, to grow their businesses, and to hire more workers.” The current implementation of PTO post issuance proceedings is undermining confidence in our patent system, chilling innovation at its roots, and, in eyes of some, giving the AIA a bad name.