Posts Tagged: "inventor"

Last week, all eyes were on the first two days of historic Senate Judiciary IP Subcommittee Hearings, led by Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chair of the Subcommittee, and Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee. The purpose of the hearing was simple: to determine a fix for the disaster foisted upon the industry by the patent eligibility jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States. The testimony of the first 30 witnesses has already been summarized, so there is no need for me to dive into the particulars of who said what here. Suffice it to say that the Subcommittee heard a range of opinions—some better supported than others.

This week on Capitol Hill, the Senate IP Subcommittee will hold its third and final hearing on patent eligibility issues that currently exist in the U.S. patent system. Elsewhere in the Senate, hearings will focus on privacy issues posed by data brokers as well as Federal Communications Commission oversight. Hearings over at the House of Representatives will discuss topics including NASA’s science mission, sexual harassment issues within the scientific professions, and research leading towards increased use of renewable energy sources. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will also host an event to explore new tax models affecting U.S.-based Internet services companies.

Last week at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), 23 institution decisions were issued based on petitions to challenge the validity of patents via inter partes review (IPR) proceedings. Only four petitions were denied institution last week, while four petitions that were instituted were joined to other IPR proceedings already ongoing at the PTAB. Qualcomm faced two institution decisions, adding to the legal troubles the company has faced in recent years in enforcing its intellectual property. Apple secured three successful decisions to institute, including two IPRs that are joined to other proceedings brought by HTC Corporation. Visa, Netflix and Guest Tek Interactive Entertainment also saw successes with their IPR petitions, while ResMed had two petitions instituted and two denied by the PTAB. 

The first of three scheduled hearings in which the Senate IP Subcommittee will hear testimony from a total of 45 witnesses on the subject of patent eligibility law raised many questions. While some read the proposed draft bill released by Congress last month as clearly overturning AMP v. Myriad, for example, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), Ranking Member of the Senate IP Subcommittee, said today that was not his intention. In his opening statement, Coons pushed back against an article published on Monday by The Washington Post, which indicated that the proposed draft bill to revise Section 101 would enable the patenting of genes. Coons called the article “significantly misleading” and noted that “our proposal would not change the law to allow a company to patent a gene as it exists in the human body. I believe I speak for the Chairman and myself when I say we do not intend to overrule that holding of the 2013 Myriad decision.” The concerns leading to the Washington Post article arose in recent days, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a statement and held a phone briefing for Congressional staffers claiming that the proposed draft bill would enable the patenting of genes. Sherry Knowles, Principal of Knowles Intellectual Property Strategies and one of the witnesses at today’s hearing, penned a rebuttal of the ACLU’s position that IPWatchdog published on Monday. Knowles spoke in the second panel of today’s hearing and said she hopes the proposed bill would in fact overturn the Myriad decision because “there’s been a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products. The highest public interest is life itself and that has to be the goal of this statute.”

The first of three hearings on patent eligibility reform is now underway; Q. Todd Dickinson, former USPTO Director and Senior Partner at Polsinelli, was one of the first to testify, and in part emphasized to the Senate IP Subcommittee that the courts have shirked their duty to address this issue, so Congress must. Dickinson provided the Subcommittee a list of the 42 cases that have been denied cert by the Supreme Court since Alice and said that the current situation”encourages picking winners and losers” and actually pushes companies and inventors towards trade secrets.

If a judge ever botched an antitrust case involving patents, the prize may go to federal district Judge Lucy Koh for her ruling in favor of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in its antitrust action against Qualcomm. The intersection of intellectual property and antitrust is riddled with land mines and booby traps. The danger of getting an IP issue in this vicinity wrong becomes all the more likely after the Koh ruling and, thus, all the more dangerous and far-reaching. Judge Koh managed to step on several trip wires in her decision for the FTC in a case that should never have been brought, never tried, and should have been withdrawn or dropped. The damage from this ruling will reverberate far beyond the global leader in wireless connectivity technology the FTC unfairly hammered in this case. “Patents are a form of property,” Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim has said, “and the right to exclude is one of the most fundamental bargaining rights a property owner possesses. Rules that deprive a patent holder from exercising this right . . . undermine the incentive to innovate.” Basic principles like property rights, exclusivity, dynamic competition and the incentive to innovate escaped Judge Koh’s grasp.

IPWatchdog’s coverage of the November 2017 Bunch O Balloons district court trial left off with an Eastern District of Texas jury awarding $12.3 million in damages to patent owner Tinnus Enterprises and its partner ZURU against major U.S. telemarketing firms Telebrands and its subsidiaries. The jury found that Telebrands had willfully infringed Tinnus’ patents that protected Tinnus’ Bunch O Balloons invention, and that those patents were not invalid. But even with the November 2017 jury award in place, Tinnus still faced the upcoming specter of patent validity trials for which Telebrands had petitioned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) for the patents-in-suit. Additionally, the Eastern District of Texas had not yet ruled on post-trial motions regarding the jury’s verdict.

To kick off the month in which Alice v. CLS Bank will turn five, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property will hold its first two hearings on “The State of Patent Eligibility in America.” The hearings are scheduled for Tuesday, June 4 and Wednesday June 5, both at 2:30 PM in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and the Subcommittee has now published the rosters for both hearings. As mentioned in a Senate press release last week, there will be three hearings held in total, on June 4, 5 and 11, featuring three panels of five witnesses each, for a total of 45 witnesses over three days. Overall, it is quite balanced between those who will argue for and against reform. This is quite a change in and of itself; congressional hearings on patent legislation over the past decade have largely favored those arguing against pro-patent reforms. IPWatchdog will cover these hearings, and several of the witnesses testifying next week — Chief Judge Paul Michel, Sherry Knowles and Phil Johnson —will be speaking later in the month at our Patent Masters™ Symposium titled Alice Five Years Later. 

In Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. v. Sequenom, Inc., 788 F.3d 1371, 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2015) the Federal Circuit belittled pioneering work at Oxford University, indisputably one of the world’s leading research institutions. In the Athena Diagnostics v. Mayo Collaborative Services decision handed down early in 2019, the Federal Circuit surpassed itself by belittling pioneering work representing the combined efforts of Oxford University and the Max-Plank Gesellschaft, two of the world’s leading research institutions. A petition for en banc review has been filed and is supported by amicus briefs. This article further supports the need for review, emphasizing inadequate attention paid to the positive eligibility provisions of 35 USC 101, conflict with Diamond v Diehr, an inadmissible extension of admissions within the patent description regarding a genus of techniques to cover a previously undisclosed species of techniques within the genus, and the need to give equal treatment to those who make pioneering inventions or discoveries and those whose inventions or discoveries are incremental.

On May 7, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) designated two recent decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as precedential, bringing the number of PTAB decisions declared precedential since the beginning of this March to 11. The recently designated decisions, both of which resulted in the denial of institution in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings, appear to be part of a general trend to designate as precedential patent owner-friendly decisions denying the institution of PTAB trials. The first of these recent precedential designations was NHK Spring Co., Ltd. v. Intri-Plex Technologies, Inc., an IPR proceeding that was denied institution last September. NHK Spring had requested an IPR to challenge the validity of four claims of U.S. Patent No. 6183841, titled Optimized Low Profile Swage Mount Base Plate Attachment of Suspension Assembly for Hard Disk Drive. The patent covers a disk head assembly having a low-profile base plate which addressed a need for increased data storage capacity in hard disk drives.

Pursuant to the 2018 SUCCESS Act, Congress directed the USPTO to submit to it a report on the results of a study that provides legislative recommendations for how to increase the number of women, minorities, and veterans who apply for and obtain patents. To help gather information as part of its study, the USPTO opened its doors for public comment on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in one of three scheduled hearings. Five inventors spoke at this hearing. I was honored to be one of them. Patricia Duran spoke first, providing testimony in Spanish while I read the English translation. Duran expressed appreciation for the SUCCESS Act’s intent, but quickly set the tone with this question: “What good is a patent if one cannot feasibly defend it?” She added that “women, minorities, and veterans all reside in the same category with other independent inventors, and this class—the independent inventors—is the true underrepresented class.” She was not alone. Three other inventors who provided oral testimony stated that all independent inventors are underrepresented in today’s patent system, which I found interesting, given that they all belonged to the classes at issue: women, minorities, and/or veterans.

I am Emil Malak, CEO of VoIP-Pal.com Inc., and a named inventor on two U.S. patents–Mobile Gateway: US 8,630,234 & Electrostatic Desalinization and Water Purification: US 8,016,993. To date, our company owns 22 issued and or allowed patents, which we developed over the past 15 years. Against all odds, we have been 100% successful in defending eight Inter Partes Reviews (IPRs): four from Apple, three from AT&T, and one from Unified Patents. We are presently in litigation against Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Twitter and Amazon. My experience with Voip-Pal has made it painfully clear that the deck has been stacked against companies who own IP being used without license by large tech companies. The America Invents Act (AIA), orchestrated by Silicon Valley, was designed to destroy the very ladder they climbed to ascend to their lofty perch, and make certain that they could not be challenged.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established World IP Day (WIPD) 19 years ago to celebrate the day on which the WIPO Convention entered into force: April 26, 1970. With nearly five decades under its belt, WIPO has had its successes and scandals, but there can be no doubt that IP rights are more harmonized now than ever before. This year’s WIPD theme is “Reach for Gold: IP and Sports.” While the topic may seem slightly off-mark to some, with so much else to talk about in the context of a rapidly-evolving global digital economy in which IP rights are becoming both more crucial and increasingly threatened in many jurisdictions, it does underscore the degree to which IP permeates industries and facilitates consumer experiences.In honor of World IP Day, we asked the experts to weigh in on how far we’ve come in the two decades since the holiday was established, and what the future holds. As usual, there were optimists, pessimists, and those in between. Here’s what they had to say.

On March 21, Personalized Media Communications, LLC (PMC), owner of 98 patents covering networked equipment technologies, filed patent lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against major tech firms Netflix, Google, and Akamai. The lawsuits claim that the defendants infringed upon intellectual property that covers a major part of the adaptive streaming capabilities for each of the three businesses. In the lawsuits, PMC is asserting claims from six patents it has earned between 2010 and 2017, each titled Signal Processing Apparatus and Methods.

The Framework rolled out by Congress last week to fix Section 101 law in the United States will not improve the current 101 disaster. It codifies current exceptions and even adds an entirely new exception specifically intended to protect big tech monopolies. Congress is pitifully unserious about restoring our innovation engine. For more than 200 years, the U.S. patent system was the primary engine propelling the United States to lead the world in virtually every new technology. But over the last 15 years, activists in Congress, the courts and the administration pulverized this engine to benefit a few huge multinationals in exchange for political donations and favors. Today, the patent system is a complete failure causing technologies critical to our economy, job creation, global technological lead, and national security to flee the U.S. and go to China. In a brutal political irony, the Communist Chinese have a better property rights system than we do here in the U.S.