Posts Tagged: "legislation"

On Thursday, July 23, the United States Senate passed the Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act of 2019 as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

A bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation to stop the theft of U.S. intellectual property by foreign governments, with a focus on China. The bill, titled the “Safeguarding American Innovation Act,” was introduced today by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Rob Portman (R-OH), Tom Carper (D-DE), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), James Risch (R-ID), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Chris Coons (D-DE), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), John Barrasso (R-WY), Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV), Rick Scott (R-FL), Mike Braun (R-IN), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

Draft legislation has emerged that ostensibly would boost rapid innovation to combat the coronavirus. Bottom line: The bill is a mixed bag with a lot of questions… The Facilitating Innovation to Fight Coronavirus Act appears to be an attempt to bring any and all viable medical inventions to bear, as quickly as possible, in our fight to defeat COVID-19, which is absolutely to be commended. Despite attempts to mitigate the harm that outright eminent domain on patent rights (vigorously advocated by some) would certainly cause, the legislation needs more work.

In mid-December 2019, Congressmen Danny Davis (D-IL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) introduced the Inventor Rights Act of 2019 into the House of Representatives. If passed, the bill would do much to reestablish strong patent protection rights for inventors who own their own patents, giving them an opportunity to opt out of validity trials at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) while also undoing many of the harmful effects of U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as TC Heartland and eBay. While the Inventor Rights Act is directed at a subset of patent owners feeling the brunt of changes to the patent system wrought by Congress and the federal judiciary over more than a decade, the bill does go a long way in correcting the situation for those individual inventors who are likely to have the fewest resources to enforce their patent rights.

News coverage abounds about the latest breakthroughs in facial recognition technology. But, while this technology is an amazing technical achievement, it is not without potential drawbacks to privacy for those unwittingly subject to facial recognition in public. This includes the recent emergence of facial recognition technology paired with the large amounts of data available on the internet and social media through the scraping of images from numerous internet sources to provide an unusually powerful tool for uncovering the identity – including name, address and interests – of an individual through the use of just a single photograph. In response to these burgeoning technological advances in the field, cities and states have begun developing an array of legal approaches to regulate facial recognition technology, some scrambling to limit or prohibit its use, others enthusiastically embracing it. In this patchwork legal landscape, it can be challenging to know where and when the technology can be used – and for what purposes.

The United States Senate Finance Committee today considered the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in an Open Executive Session and voted 25 to 3 to move the bill forward.

The USMCA enjoys wide bipartisan support, but Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) voted against the bill. Toomey and Cassidy objected largely to process issues, as the Committee was not allowed to present amendments under a fast-track process, while Whitehouse was critical of the agreement’s lack of urgency on climate change. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reached agreement on the USMCA, which would, if ratified, replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on December 10. Notably for the IP community, the new version struck down provisions that would have expanded regulatory data protection for biologics inventions from five years in Mexico and eight years in Canada to 10 years in both countries.

Yesterday, the Counterfeit Goods Seizure Act of 2019 was introduced in the U.S. Senate to empower U.S. Customs and Border Protection to enforce U.S. design patents at the U.S. border. The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI). Currently, Section 1595a(c)(2)(C) of Title 19 of the U.S. Code empowers Customs to enforce copyrights and trademarks that have been previously recorded with Customs. The bill proposes amending 19 U.S.C. § 1595a(c)(2)(C) to give Customs similar discretionary power to seize and detain imported goods that infringe a recorded U.S. design patent. The bill is publicly supported by Nike Inc. and the 3M Company, as well as the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) and the American Intellectual Property Owners Association (AIPLA).

It has been one year since my software patent was invalidated in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  Now, this intellectual property is considered worthless and my dream of paying off extensive student loans with the proceeds from patent licensing fees are in the past. The irony being that if it were not for these extensive student loans, this invention, most likely, would not have come to into being. My patent No. 6,769,915, issued in 2003, was invalidated under Section 101 and struck down on appeal. The patent covers “a user-interactive behavior modification system” that is in competition with technology pursued by the companies including Nike, FitBit, Apple, and Samsung.  The rules that existed when I applied for this software patent in 2000 no longer guarantee myself and hundreds of other independent inventors the right to collect patent licensing fees. This right was granted to all with The Patent Act of 1790. Yet, over the last 15 years, the U.S. patent laws have been changed drastically by extremely well-financed lobbyists on behalf of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) largest customers— global corporations, including the Big Tech industry. This has relieved Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. from the necessity of having to pay independent inventors software licensing fees. With this shift in intellectual property laws, the once small startups of Silicon Valley have become the large monopolies they are now.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California recently issued a decision in the closely watched Patagonia, Inc. v. Anheuser-Busch, LLC, 19-CV-02702 case. Here, the clothing company Patagonia sued the beer company Anheuser-Busch for trademark infringement, unfair competition, dilution of a famous mark, and cancellation of Anheuser-Busch’s various PATAGONIA trademark registrations. Anheuser-Busch moved to dismiss certain claims, including the dilution claim, for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6). The court issued a decision finding that Patagonia had adequately pled its dilution claim. The case provides trademark practitioners with insight into early case strategies when asserting and defending against a trademark dilution claim.

This week in the U.S. capital, the Senate will hold committee hearings on antitrust issues in digital platforms and real-time payment systems, a sector of fintech that will also be explored by the House Task Force on Financial Technology. Elsewhere in the House of Representatives, there will be hearings on Veterans’ Affairs scheduling technology, clean industrial innovations and medical research funding at the NIH. The week kicks off at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation with a look at small business innovation funding programs. The Brookings Institution will also host events on Army modernization efforts and issues in disaggregating health data for improved policy-making.

Yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Representatives Mark Takano (D-CA) and Bill Foster (D-IL) introduced the Office of Technology Assessment Improvement and Enhancement Act, which if enacted would introduce enhancements to the existing Office of Technology Assessment statute codified at 2 U.S.C. §472. According to the sponsors, this bipartisan legislation would improve and enhance the existing Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) by making it more accessible and responsive to the needs of Members of Congress. The OTA, which existed for a generation spanning three decades in the 1970s, 80s and into the mid 1990s, became defunct when Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 midterm elections. A draft funding bill released by House Democrats this spring first showed interest in resurrecting the OTA.

I have heard it said that a right without a remedy isn’t really a right. This saying completely and accurately sums up my experience with copyright infringement in the modern age. I am not an attorney, let alone a copyright lawyer. I am a small business owner whose livelihood is constantly affected by the lack of reasonable avenues for pursuing infringement of my work. For more than a decade, I have been making my living as a commercial photographer and filmmaker. During that time I have witnessed my works infringed online—an exceedingly easy thing to do in the digital age—but also in print. A most memorable example of this was finding my photo enlarged as the backdrop to a competitor’s trade show booth while my paying client was rightfully using the same artwork across the room at their own booth. An act like this is both unlawful and egregious. But the extraordinary costs of pursuing a copyright infringement suit in federal court prohibit me from seeking recourse this way without taking on the additional risk of bankruptcy.

Just as the drug pricing debate on Capitol Hill is heating up, an important new study, “The Bayh-Dole Act’s Vital Importance to the U.S. Life-Sciences Innovation System,” published by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), underscores the law’s contribution to the United States’ lead in the life sciences. The report warns that attempts to misuse the march-in rights provision of the law to control drug prices would have serious consequences to our competitiveness and our health. Predictably, the critics condemned the report as “A lot of myth and propaganda.” Despite being repeatedly rebuffed, they continue to argue the law authorizes the government to license competitors if a resulting product isn’t “reasonably priced.” That debate spilled over to the Capitol Hill unveiling of the study, in which I participated. What happened there sheds a lot of light on the nature of the argument.

I recently delivered a keynote address at a special session of the AUTM Annual Meeting, where the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) released its new University Technology Transfer Best Practices Guide. Following is a transcript of that speech.