Posts Tagged: "technology"

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.

The training of artificial intelligence models using copyrighted material continues to stir debate and prompt litigation. In the latest salvo, the New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI – the creator of ChatGPT – for infringement under the federal Copyright Act. As often is the case with claims like these, the merits will center on the fair-use doctrine, a well-recognized legal principle in copyright law that aims to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public benefit of free speech and creative works. Fair use is a defense to a claim of copyright infringement that must be affirmatively invoked by the accused infringer.

Innovation continues across industries at a rapid pace. Many companies maintain highly valuable trade secrets and private data that provide them with a competitive market advantage. The rapidly evolving technological landscape, however, leads to new and more sophisticated threats to a company’s trade secrets and other private information. Whether organizations are equipped to confront this challenge is an open question.  

With each new year comes an uptick in purchases of workout equipment, blenders, gym memberships and wearable devices of all shapes and sizes. Plans are made and uploaded to a wearable device—including smart rings, shoes and bands—and its accompanying app to track progress. These devices and apps share information with each other and across platforms, tracking a person’s diet, sleep or even sexual activity.

Both the Biden and Trump Administrations have made it abundantly clear that economic and technology security is now national security. In the latest National Security Strategy, the Biden Administration stated, “Technology is central to today’s geopolitical competition and to the future of our national security, economy, and democracy. U.S. and allied leadership in technology and innovation has long underpinned our economic prosperity and military strength. In the next decade, critical and emerging technologies are poised to retool economies, transform militaries, and reshape the world.”

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today that it is launching the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot, as directed by President Biden’s Executive Order on AI in October 2023. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is one of 10 government agencies that are partnering with NSF on the pilot. Biden’s October Executive Order (EO) announced a series of new agency directives for managing risks related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, prioritizing risks related to critical infrastructure, cybersecurity and consumer privacy. The EO in part directed NSF to launch a pilot for NAIRR within 90 days, which it said was “consistent with past recommendations” of a task force on the subject.

When licensing standard essential patents (SEPs), the SEP licensor and the standard implementer (also known as the SEP licensee), go through two phases of negotiation. The first phase is the technical phase, followed by the second phase, the commercial discussion. In the technical phase, the SEP licensor must provide evidence that at least one patent of its portfolio is valid and standard essential. This is done by providing rigorously conducted claim charts that map claims against the standard’s sections, providing evidence that all claim elements read on the technical standard specification. Typically, only a few claim charts are needed in this first technical phase, since only one patent must be valid and essential to make the case that the standard implementing party is infringing. The second phase, the commercial discussion, is much more complex. Here, the SEP owner must provide evidence of the value of its SEP portfolio for a given standard supporting why the proposed royalty rate is FRAND (fair reasonable and non- discriminatory).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is global, and copyright laws are national. Thus, some countries will have strict laws on making copies of copyrighted content to “train” an AI system while others will be more relaxed. Laws are about economics, and countries with more relaxed laws are likely to be countries with smaller creative industries and which wish to use the relaxed legal regime to attract AI investment. AI companies will use these jurisdictional differences as leverage to lobby for the relaxation of legal standards in countries with stricter laws.

At the end of 2023, Law 14,785/2023 was published in Brazil’s official gazette, creating a new regulatory framework for chemical pesticides and environmental control products. The result of decades of discussions in the National Congress, the new law brings provisions that represent improvements to the system, such as the mandatory use of risk analysis in the process of granting registration of products and the requirement to harmonize with internationally established standards.

The Bayh-Dole Coalition yesterday submitted comments to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) asking the agency to withdraw the recently published Draft Interagency Guidance Framework for Considering the Exercise of March-In Rights. The Coalition’s Executive Director, Joseph Allen, who authored the letter and formerly served as the Senate Judiciary Committee staffer to Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN), explained that “the framework would irreparably undermine one of the most successful laws in American history.” While Bayh-Dole contemplates march-in rights, the law strictly limits the situations in which such rights can be exercised and does not make any reference to pricing as a criterion for marching in. March-in requests have been rejected on a bipartisan basis multiple times since the bill became law and even then-Senator Joe Biden himself has opposed attempts to inject price controls into the law.

Reasonable compensation for standard essential patent (SEP) holders is crucial to create the incentives for adequate investments in standards. In particular, high-quality standards have underlain the development and proliferation of the global wireless technologies that have played such a central role in the innovation-driven growth of the internet economy. (For the key role of strong standards in technological innovation, see, for example, here, here, here, and here). It follows that the discriminatory reduction of compensation for SEP holders would reduce their incentives to participate and invest in standard setting. This in turn would reduce quality of future standards that will be key to economic growth and vitality.

Masimo’s legal team told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in a January 15 filing that the Exclusion Order Enforcement Branch (EOE) of U.S. Customs and Border Protection has cleared a redesigned version of the Apple watches that were banned by the International Trade Commission (ITC) in late October. The CBP’s decision has not been made public. According to the filing, the redesigned watches do not contain pulse oximetry technology, which was the subject of the ITC exclusion order. The decision, which has not been made public, removes any danger of irreparable harm alleged by Apple, according to the filing.

The intellectual property regime of the International Trade Commission (ITC) made mainstream news this year with its ban on Apple Watch importation and sales in the dispute between Masimo Corporation and Apple. While that dispute is ongoing and the subject of much coverage already, here are five other key IP cases with a variety of important rulings for parties at the ITC—particularly some outside of the typically patent-centric docket.

Today, U.S. Representatives María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Madeleine Dean (D-PA) introduced the No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications (No AI FRAUD) Act of 2024 to create legal mechanisms by which Americans can prevent unauthorized uses of their likenesses and voices by generative AI platforms. The bill seeks to provide for intellectual property (IP) rights in an individual’s voice and likeness as well as remedies including statutory damages and disgorged profits.