Posts Tagged: "intellectual property owners association"

I recently visited Egypt as part of a team led by the Departments of State and Agriculture, supported by the good folks at the AUTM Foundation. Egypt, like many countries, is looking at our model for integrating research universities into their economy. I was asked to speak about the Bayh-Dole Act and thought it was important to emphasize that there were many factors required beyond enacting a law to reverse an entrenched national policy. On returning, I was struck by Gene Quinn’s article “It May Be Time to Abolish the Federal Circuit.” After leaving the Senate staff, I became Executive Director of the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO). Our highest priority was creating the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) to restore confidence in the U.S. patent system. Framed in my office is a very gracious thank you note from Judge Howard Markey, who inspired this effort and went on to become the first Chief Judge of the new court. Judge Markey was the only person I ever met with an unending supply of funny patent jokes, but that’s another story. Unlike Bayh-Dole, that effort appears to have gone off track. So why did one change stick and one not?

On February 20, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Mission Product Holdings Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The case presents the question of whether a debtor-licensor’s rejection of an executory trademark license agreement in bankruptcy, pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 365, results in the agreement’s complete termination, including loss of the licensee’s right to use the licensed trademark. Given that trademarks are the most widely used form of registered intellectual property, and trademark rights often are among a debtor’s key assets, the treatment of the debtor’s licenses of those rights is an issue that arises frequently in the bankruptcy context. For this reason, among others, the issue presented by this case has been hailed by the International Trademark Association (INTA) as “the most significant unresolved legal issue in trademark licensing.”

The Boston Patent Law Association (BPLA) has announced its support for a proposal for a legislative fix to 35 U.S.C. § 101, the statute governing basic patentability in U.S. patent law, which was jointly offered earlier this year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) and the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA). The BPLA now becomes the latest patent law organization to support the proposed legislative amendment to Section 101 that is designed to address major uncertainties in patentability stemming from various cases decided in recent years by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sen. Harris followed up by asking whether algorithms were mathematical representations of laws of nature. “You’re getting right to the heart of the issue,” Iancu said. What Iancu said after that should be a major breath of fresh air to inventors and patent owners frustrated by Section 101 validity issues in the wake of Alice and Mayo: “This is one place where I believe courts have gone off the initial intent. There are human-made algorithms, human-made algorithms that are the result of human ingenuity that are not set from time immemorial and that are not absolutes, they depend on human choices. Those are very different from E=mc2 and they are very different from the Pythagorean theorem, for example.”

The Girl Scouts of America, in conjunction with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Education Foundation, is doing its part to promote innovative thinking patterns among girls with the creation of the Intellectual Property (IP) Patch. The IP Patch is available to Girl Scouts in four different levels: Brownie; Junior; Cadette; and Senior.

In its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will once again consider the extraterritorial effect of U.S. patent law; specifically, whether “the Federal Circuit erred in holding that supplying a single, commodity component of a multi-component invention from the United States is an infringing act under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f)(1), exposing the manufacturer to liability for all worldwide sales.” Life Tech. Corp. v. Promega Corp., No. 14-1538. Petitioners (all subsidiaries of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., which I shall collectively call “Life”) urge the Court to hold the statute requires “all or a large percentage closely approximating all” of the components of the invention to have been made in the United States. Though Promega Corporation has yet to respond, the Court should decline Life’s invitation. This does not mean, however, that the decision of the Federal Circuit, Promega Corp. v. Life Tech. Corp., 773 F.3d 1338 (Fed. Cir. 2014), should be affirmed. Rather, though none of the briefs filed in the case have said so, the Supreme Court should reverse because the single, commodity component at issue cannot, as a matter of law, even under Promega’s interpretation of the statute, comprise a “substantial portion” of the components of the invention.