Posts Tagged: "technology"

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.

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.

Recently, in the matter of Radian Memory Systems LLC, v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (E.D. Texas, 2024), a Statement of Interest (SOI) was filed by the United States of America setting forth the views of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Antitrust Division, regarding “how to assess whether a plaintiff alleging patent infringement has demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm under the four-factor test for a preliminary injunction under Supreme Court and Federal Circuit precedent.”

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?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday affirmed a district court’s finding that Netflix, Inc. had proven the challenged claims of CA, Inc.’s patent for distributed computing technology obvious. The opinion was authored by U.S. District Judge Jennifer Hall of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, sitting by designation.

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.

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Monday, July 21, introduced the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which would chiefly bar artificial intelligence (AI) companies from using copyrighted works to train their generative AI tools without authors’ permission. The bill was announced less than a week after Hawley held a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism in which he called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history.”

On Wednesday, July 16, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training.” Subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history” and rejected the suggestion that the courts should determine the path forward.

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it was launching a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool for design patent examiners. DesignVision, a centralized tool for querying multiple industrial design data sources, is the latest move in the USPTO’s overall effort to address the patent examination backlog, which has involved both the introduction of AI-powered examination tools like DesignVision and the streamlining of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) activities through evolving standards for discretionary denials.

Following a June order of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on fair use in a case brought against generative AI tool Anthropic by a group of authors, Anthropic has now requested permission to file an interlocutory appeal. The underlying lawsuit was filed by journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024 against Anthropic on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” The suit challenged only the inputs of the LLMs, not the outputs.

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.”

As policymakers consider the future of American healthcare, it is imperative to recognize the potential dangers of adopting foreign price controls for life-saving medications. These price controls, which are referred to as foreign “reference pricing,” would tie the price of medicines in the United States to prices set by foreign governments that are paid in other countries with vastly different healthcare systems. While this approach may initially sound appealing, the reality is that foreign reference pricing imports the failed models of other countries rather than rewarding innovation or recognizing the true value of breakthrough therapies. It pegs prices here to bureaucratic decisions made abroad and threatens to undermine the very engine of medical innovation that has made the United States a global leader in life sciences and benefited millions of patients.

The European Commission on Thursday published “The General-Purpose AI Code of Practice,” which is meant to complement the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act approved last year. The Code was developed by 13 independent experts across four working groups and with input from over 1,000 stakeholders, according to the European Commission. The EU AI Act came into force on August 1, 2024, with most provisions of the regulation applying as of August 2, 2026. However, the regulation said that compliance for prohibited practices were to be in effect by February 2, 2025, considering “the unacceptable risk associated with the use of AI in certain ways.”

Over the past year, I’ve been in dozens of boardrooms where the same question keeps resurfacing: What are we missing in monetizing our intellectual property (IP) assets? The answer may surprise you—it’s no longer just licensing. It’s private equity. We’re witnessing an unprecedented wave of private equity (PE) attention directed toward patent portfolios. What was once a niche curiosity has turned into strategic financial engineering.