Posts Tagged: "dean kamen"

Last night at the National Portrait Gallery, which is the modern day site of the Old Patent Office Building, the IPO Educational Foundation awarded Dean Kamen the 40th National Inventor of the Year Award, and recognized Doug Henderson with the 6th Distinguished IP Professional Award. Also honored were the teenagers who won the 3rd IP Video Contest in three separate age categories. In attendance, however, was Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who is the Junior Senator from Kamen’s home State of New Hampshire, who promised to carefully consider patent reform and pledged to listen to the concerns of innovators.

Dean Kamen: “I have a lot of concerns [that H.R. 3309] will serve to dramatically increase the barriers – especially for small inventors – to be able to get and protect their intellectual property, which as a consequence will prevent the public from getting access to what should become the next generation of great technology that will deal with all issues – health care, environment and education…If anything this country should be finding ways to strengthen the patent system in the global competitive environment, not make it harder to get and protect intellectual property. We need to add incentives, not add barriers.”

Today, after several years of substantial turmoil, patent eligibility in a variety of economically significant technologies is extremely uncertain, including software, natural products, medical diagnostics and personalized medicine. It is with great irony that one of the few things we know with any degree of certainty is that business methods are patent eligible… If you haven’t noticed, overwhelming portions of the U.S. economy are tied to the biotechnology and software sectors. Are we about to throw away our economic leadership? There are already some lawyers talking openly with clients about whether they may be able to in some cases actually get broader, more certain protection outside the United States.

Tech sector giants have been crying and moaning about how the patent system has run amok and needs to be scaled back, and continually beg for patent reform that would gut the patent system and weaken patent rights… Even mighty Microsoft couldn’t maintain their monopoly, and only the foolish would anticipate Google, Facebook and other tech giants to be on top indefinitely. That isn’t how the tech sector works, or is intended to work. But if a vibrant, robust and strong patent system is not there for start-ups today they will never become the giant, innovation shifting, growth companies of the future. That would be terrible for the economy, lead to stagnant innovation and guarantee that slothful, giant companies that have lost the ability to innovate would remain dominant rather than going the way of the dinosaur.

In a bit of a twist this year, the party nominating the National Inventor of the Year will also be recognized. Most nominations come from patent attorneys, so this is a great way for the IPO to recognize the team behind the inventor, as well as honoring the inventor. The nomination deadline is June 1, 2011, so now is your chance attorneys and agents to nominate those inventors you work with for their innovative contributions. I can’t think of a more worthwhile endeavor for our industry than to recognize remarkable innovators, so I encourage everyone to go through their client rosters and nominate those outstanding inventors who deserve recognition.

In this edition of News, Notes & Announcements, websites engaged in the sale of counterfeit merchandise were ordered seized as part of a joint investigation coordinated between the Department of Justice and ICE. Additionally, there will be an event celebrating the 30th Anniversary of passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in Washington, DC on Wednesday morning; the USPTO will hold a roundtable on Friday, December 3, 2010 to discuss trademark prosecution best practices; FIRST, the company founded by Dean Kamen, received a 5 year contract from NASA to provide support for hands-on robotics competitions aimed at inspiring our youth to pursue science and technology; ITT launches an innovative new graduate program that combines engineering, design and intellectual property; the mother of all patent trolls is back at it both in terms of licensing and in terms of acquiring more patents; and patented software that makes it possible to find plagiarized code is released.

Those who don’t believe innovation leads to job creation have their heads firmly implanted in the sand and simply must choose to ignore history, which proves otherwise. It is flat out irresponsible to suggest that speeding up the process at the USPTO would be anything other than one darn good idea, and practically essential to the resurgence of the US economy. The authors and the Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of themselves. We all should expect more from one of the Nation’s papers of record.

AbsolutelyNew, Inc., a next generation consumer products company that develops and launches the best ideas from independent inventors, has added former Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Jon Dudas to its Advisory Board. Jon will help AbsolutelyNew advance its successful strategy of harnessing the great ideas of independent inventors.

If patents are good for Microsoft and the tech giants, patents are right for Red Hat and the open source community and patents are demanded by investors, as Dean Kamen explains, when small businesses seek funds, why would they be bad for independent inventors and small businesses? When you start out in business you don’t model yourself after those who fail, but rather after those who succeed, and the one thing successful businesses with proprietary and open source business models agree on is that patents are important enough to obtain. Simply stated, those who refuse to acknowledge the power and protection afforded by patents ignore reality and must be assumed to have an agenda.