Louis Foreman is Founder and CEO of a collection of global product design and innovation companies:
Louis leads the strategic vision for all divisions, bringing exceptional expertise around intellectual property, open innovation, and entrepreneurship. Over the past 20 years, Louis has created 9 successful start-ups and has been directly responsible for the creation of over 20 others. A prolific inventor, he is the inventor on 10 registered US patents, and his team is responsible for the development and filing of well over 600 more. Louis was elected in 2010 to the boards of the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation (IPO) and The United Inventors Association. Also serves as a director of the James Dyson Foundation.
In 2008, Foreman was appointed by United States Secretary of Commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez, to serve a 3-year term on the nine-person Patent Public Advisory Committee of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In 2011, Louis was appointed by Secretary Gary Locke to serve an additional 3-year term. He has also been called upon numerous times to speak on the floor of Congress regarding patent reform and the American Invents Act, enacted in 2011.
Infringers should not be able to arrogantly and recklessly violate patents for years but ultimately pay only the same amount they would have paid the patent owner for a license in the first place. Currently, however, that is the situation that exists, because an infringer can avoid being stuck with enhanced damages if the infringer’s attorneys, for the first time in the litigation, raise a newly-devised (but ultimately incorrect) argument that the patent is invalid or not infringed, even if this was not the actual reason why the infringer refused to take a license years earlier.