Posts Tagged: "interview"

Why should we care about getting more women inventing? What does it matter? You don’t find more innovation by looking in places where you’re not likely to discover it. You’ll find innovation by researching and developing and we have several untapped sources of potential. Up until now there has been little or no real significant output on an entrepreneurial innovative level for female inventors, as well as with minority inventors. So I’m very interested in the types of programs that are going on at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and I’m very interested in the efforts to try and bring women into the entrepreneurial and innovative space because I think that’s where we can find creative, fresh ideas. So I think this is a very important initiative.

“[W]e are finding that when the schools that are starting to measure their invention disclosure and their patent filings, again with at least one woman represented, even when they control for the percentage of female faculty members within a given department, for instance, they’re still finding that yes, there are fewer women represented but those fewer women that are represented are not filing as many invention disclosures as their male counterparts. So while we do need to concentrate on changing the culture and on making sure that girls and women are encouraged within these fields, we also have to, I think, for the sake of our economy, concentrate on women who are in these fields and are working and make sure that they also know about the patent process and find that accessible to them.”

The First Action interview (FAI) program affords applicants a no-fee opportunity to speak with examiners early during prosecution, before the examiner has invested the time to prepare a complete Office Action. Yet, a free FAI request is filed in a mere 1 of 625 applications. Our analysis shows that the prosecution benefits of this program continue to be realized and that the program improves both the efficacy (allowance rate) and efficiency (office-action counts and time to issuance) of prosecution. We have seen, both in our professional experiences and through these statistics, such great benefit of this program that we have encouraged the USPTO to take this program one step further and establish a Pre-Search Interview Program that would allow the applicant to explain and potentially demonstrate an invention even prior to the examiner conducting a search.

AUTM collects quantitative data and facts about the benefits of university tech transfer, but the qualitative evidence is actually the most important. With the Better World Report, which just hit 500 stories, AUTM provides evidence that university tech transfer makes a better world. Just look at those stories in the Better World Report; they’re heartwarming. It is amazing that some of the critics tend to overlook or completely discount the very real stories of success. I don’t know what the critics are after— I guess the success of university tech transfer doesn’t fit the narrative that they wish to impose on everybody.

What follows is our wide ranging discussion, which start out with what Cohn is doing with INTA and then moves into an in depth discussion of issues surrounding counterfeiting, the newly formed Trademark Caucus in Congress, and the recent Federal Circuit decision on disparaging trademark registrations in the so-called Slants case. We ended with the familiar fun questions that give us an opportunity to get to know Cohn.

That leaves the fun questions, which really give us an opportunity to get to know Director Lee, the type of music she listens to, the movies she watches, what she reads and what she enjoys doing in her spare time. We pick up our conversation talking about her recent trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and what captured the imagination of her inner tech geek.

There were no topics ruled out of bounds for this 30 minute interview, not even the Supreme Court’s recent decision to accept cert. in Cuozzo, although as an attorney myself I know better than to ask questions that would have certainly provoked a polite “no comment” response in the face of ongoing litigation. Nevertheless, our conversation was wide ranging. We discussed the release of the Copyright White paper, which among other things recommends expanding eligibility for statutory damages in copyright infringement actions. We also discussed Lee’s recent visit to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the power outage that brought down USPTO electronic filing systems, the Office’s patent quality initiative, the new patent classification system, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and more.

Bruce Kisliuk: “I think over time that pendulum will swing back. I think the nature of the business is that it’s likely going to come by successive case law decisions, I think we’re going slowly see things come back. I think clarity on where the line is on eligibility will get firmer, and I think there will be a stronger appreciation of patent value. It might take some time, maybe by an example — and I hate to think this –because I don’t necessarily want something like this to happen, but government often reacts to disasters. They don’t necessarily see the subtleties. They wait until there’s a disaster and then they react to the disaster and I’d rather not see a true crisis, I’d rather see some course-correction.”

EDWARD JUNG: ”At the other end of that value chain you now have some of the most valuable companies in the entire world in places like China. What stops them from taking all of the value they’ve been able to derive from their over one billion population base, which well capitalizes them, and coming in and competing in the US? The US has not seen so many threats to their industry come from outside the US as opposed to within the US so in that sense I think that’s a whole new set of interesting problems to think about. I’ve actually had encounters with Chinese companies asking if there was some kind of, you know, hidden trick in the way we appear to be opening our market for them to freely come in without any IP barriers. For example, in pairing software and IP and so on and so forth.”

I think it’s interesting to see how people present this as a bipartisan issue but that covers up the fact that actually there are some very clear splits within the parties themselves. A number of the conservative think tanks and interest groups have come out and come out very strongly against broad-based patent reform. But, if you look at some of the Republicans in the House and Senate who support legislation they have not really addressed that property right piece and have focused more on litigation reform and things like fee shifting which they feel need to be part of any strong reform package. So the politics is quite split and is actually quite nuanced which I’m not sure people always appreciate.

“It has met and exceeded my expectations,” Sharon Israel told me during a recent interview to discuss her term as AIPLA President, which concludes at the end of the AIPLA Annual Meeting next week. “I thought I had a good idea of what my year would be like, but it went beyond what even I expected. There is a lot to be said for what AIPLA does in terms of advocacy, education, member services and global outreach – it is a wonderful organization.”

Yesterday I moderated a Google Hangout on the topic of patent reform, which was sponsored by the Innovation Alliance’s save the inventor campaign. Joining me for the conversation was United States Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the driving force behind the STRONG Patents Act, and Congressman Thomas Massie, an inventor and patent owner who is a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Our wide ranging conversation addressed whether patents promote or inhibit innovation, the most problematic provisions in the pending patent reform bills, whether patent reform is even necessary, and the inevitable reality that a push for patent reform will remain on the agenda for the foreseeable future.

For this story Steve Brachmann interviewed Tim Kopra, who will be Commander of Expedition 47 aboard the International Space Station… Noting that ISS astronauts were more like lab technicians than scientists, Kopra separated ISS experiments into three main categories. “For some experiments we are the subjects,” Kopra said, especially for those experiments leading to a better understanding of how spending an elongated amount of time in zero-gravity environments affects the human body. Other experiments only require some setup from astronauts after which they run fairly autonomously while still more experiments are installed on the exterior of the ISS and require no astronaut intervention at all.

KAPPOS: “Back when I was an engineer we saw it in mainframe computers where you’d make an invention and frequently initially the software wasn’t fast enough to be able to run the algorithm. So the algorithm would first be built in silicon, really expensive, but you’d wind up then fabbing up chips to be special purpose chips to run the algorithm. And then later as the software got faster the underlying computer systems got faster you’d reimplement the same algorithm in software, same algorithm, same invention but just reimplement it in software and then even later after that when the ASIC density got good enough you’d reimplement yet again in an application-specific integrated circuit, an ASIC. And so you’d have a little bit of a hybrid, if you will, but more on the hardware side, it’s an IC. It’s again putting the algorithm in a chip. And so what you’d see by looking at that is that it made no sense to say that an algorithm was patentable if it was implemented in a hardware chip. But the same algorithm implemented in software was unpatentable. Just didn’t make sense to say that.”

Drew HIRSHFELD: ”One thing that really can move the ball toward a higher quality patent is again the clarity of the record, and the amount of information that’s in there so that third parties can really tell what the patent was about. So quality has, as you’ve identified before, many ways to look at it. But when I leave this position, whenever that time is, certainly if I can have a more clear record, more full explanations on the record, I think the system would be in a better place and that is one of my goals.”