Posts Tagged: "technology"

On February 20, 2024, a Brazilian congress member, Antônio Luiz Rodrigues Mano Júnior (known as Júnior Mano), introduced a bill to amend the national IP Statute (Law #9,279/96) and regulate the ownership of inventions generated by artificial intelligence systems. Bill #303/2024 proposes the addition of a paragraph to Article 6 of the IP Statute, which regulates ownership of inventions, with the following wording: “in the case of inventions autonomously generated by artificial intelligence system, the patent can be requested in the name of the artificial intelligence system that has created the invention, being the artificial intelligence system considered the inventor and owner of rights arising from the invention.”

On February 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Freshub, Ltd. v. Amazon.com, Inc., affirming a ruling by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas in the face of appeals from both parties to the case. The Federal Circuit left the lower ruling intact after finding that the record developed at trial did not establish clear error with regards either to Freshub’s patent infringement allegations or Amazon’s inequitable conduct defense.

ChatGPT and similar generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools rely on large language models (LLMs). LLMs are fed massive amounts of content, such as text, music, photographs and film, which they analyze to discover statistical relationships among these inputs. This process, describe as “training” the LLMs, gives them the ability to generate similar content and to answer questions with seeming authority. The business community, and society at large, seems convinced that AI powered by LLMs holds great promise for increases in efficiency. But multiple lawsuits alleging copyright infringement could create a drag on development of LLMs, or worse, tip the competitive balance towards offshore enterprises that enjoy the benefits of legislation authorizing text and data mining. A lot seems to hang on the question of whether LLM training involves copyright infringement or instead is a fair use of copyrighted content.

On February 22, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) released the 2024 International IP Index, which provides an annual snapshot of the impact of legal developments in intellectual property (IP) on the innovation ecosystem in dozens of nations across the world. While this 12th version of the GIPC’s index noted some positive developments in national IP frameworks, stagnation among the recurring leaders of the IP Index is a major concern given growing efforts by governments to control prices in critical sectors of the economy, especially in pharmaceuticals.

A bipartisan group of 28 members of congress, including Senate IP Subcommittee Chair Chris Coons (D-DE), Ranking Member Thom Tillis (R-NC) and House IP Subcommittee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA), sent a letter yesterday to President Biden urging the administration to reconsider its December proposal to allow agencies to consider pricing in deciding whether and when to “march in” on patent rights. Also yesterday, four bipartisan senators wrote to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in opposition to the negotiating text of the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Agreement, warning that it “would undercut—if not destroy—the very aspects of our innovation ecosystem that just recently produced such positive results.”

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly sophisticated and play a greater role in our society, questions surrounding patentability and inventorship have come to the forefront of intellectual property discourse. This is particularly so in the wake of Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F. 4th 1207, 1213 (Fed. Cir. 2022), cert denied, 143 S. Ct. 1783 (2023), in which the Federal Circuit held that “only a natural person can be an inventor, so AI cannot be.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently issued guidance aimed at addressing these concerns.

In an ideal world, issued patents would not contain errors. In reality, patent drafting is tedious and time-consuming work and perfection is not an attainable goal. The patent industry seems to be steadily getting better, though. In a recent study, we uncovered an 11.24% decrease in errors per patent over the past four years. We observed this decrease by reviewing every patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 2020 – nearly 1.4 million patents.

On February 12, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) filed a lawsuit against streaming music company Pandora Media in the Middle District of Tennessee seeking unpaid royalty fees for blanket licenses under the Music Modernization Act (MMA). The case, prompted by recent final determinations on blanket license royalty rates, could prove an interesting test case on the level of interactivity and personal control required before a streaming service qualifies as a covered activity under the MMA.

The year 2023 marked another year of rapid advancements in quantum computing technology, showcasing significant progress in key areas such as scalable quantum computing and quantum error correction. Multiple physical realization approaches or modalities for creating quantum bits (qubits) are under development, offering different tradeoffs in performance metrics such as qubit count, error rate, decoherence time, and gate speed. Patenting activities are effective indicators of innovation speed and resource distribution in a technology field. As 2024 begins, this post explores the newest development focus and trends in the quantum computing industry through the angle of its patent landscape and discusses strategic considerations for patenting in this rapidly evolving field.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released guidance for determining inventorship of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted inventions. As the Office has previously stated, the guidance clarifies that “while AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable, the inventorship analysis should focus on human contributions, as patents function to incentivize and reward human ingenuity.” The USPTO issued a call for comments on AI inventorship in February 2023. That Federal Register Notice (FRN) asked the public to respond to 11 questions, including “how does the use of an AI system [in the invention process]…differ from the use of other technical tools”; whether AI inventions may be patentable under current patent laws on joint inventorship by, for example, simply listing the natural person involved in inventions created by AI machines; and whether statutory or regulatory changes should be made to better address AI contributions to inventions.

For many legal professionals, artificial intelligence platforms are being adopted at a speed that they think is imprudent. Well-respected patent and intellectual property thought leaders have been very open about their concerns on this point. From client confidentiality to patentability, risks posed by the use of generative AI systems must be eliminated by AI companies themselves before they partner with the patent law profession.

One day before comments closed on the Draft Interagency Guidance Framework for Considering the Exercise of March-In Rights, published by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) and the Department of Commerce last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) denied an appeal of a decision not to march in on the blockbuster prostate cancer drug, Xtandi®.

The first software patent was granted in 1968. It’s now been three decades since the “Year of the Algorithm” in 1994, when cases such as In re Allapat, In re Lowry, and In re Beauregard initiated a wave of software patents. Well over half of U.S. patents granted annually are at least “software-related,” and even a cursory search of U.S. patents reveals software patents in fields ranging from encryption to speech recognition to network security. Why, then, do so many people continue to think that software cannot be patented at all? What explains the stark contrast between the long-standing legal reality and the beliefs of otherwise well-informed engineers, high-tech business people, and even some lawyers?

February 6 is the final day of the 60-day public comment period set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) request for information on its draft interagency framework for exercising march-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. While lauded by drug pricing advocates, almost every other sector of the American economy has come out in opposition to the draft framework. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Bayh-Dole Coalition have all publicly opposed NIST’s efforts to exercise legal authority for relicensing patent rights based on product pricing considerations.

A recent decision out of the Eastern District of Texas sheds further light on Judge Rodney Gilstrap’s interpretation of a patent owner’s commitment to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) pursuant to ETSI’s Intellectual Property Rights Information Statement and Licensing Declaration (“the ETSI Licensing Declaration”). The decision, however, also raises some questions for SEP owners. A little over a year ago, we considered how French and California law would interpret a patent owner ‘s commitment to ETSI pursuant to the ETSI Licensing Declaration. The in depth analysis can be found here, while a summary version published on IPWatchdog can be found here. At a high level, we considered the issue both from the perspective of performance being possible without implementer engagement, and from the perspective of performance requiring implementer cooperation.