Posts Tagged: "Robert Armitage"

Witnesses Tell House IP Subcommittee, “It’s Up to You” to Fix Arthrex

“It’s up to you to do the right thing and fix this,” said Professor Arti Rai of The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke University School of Law near the end of a hearing on what Congress should do in the wake of the Arthrex decision yesterday. Rai was one of four IP scholars who testified during the hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet; all witnesses seemed to agree that the courts will not fix the problem soon enough to ensure the requisite certainty for U.S. patent owners and businesses, so Congress must act. In Arthrex, the Federal Circuit found that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) Administrative Patent Judges (APJs) were unconstitutionally appointed and removed the civil service protections they previously were deemed to enjoy—although, as Professor John Duffy of the University of Virginia School of Law pointed out, if the Federal Circuit ruled that the APJs can’t have tenure, that arguably means they never did. “If you go back to Marbury v. Madison, courts don’t actually strike down statutes; they simply say what the law is,” Duffy said.

Eileen McDermott

November 20, 2019

As Stakeholders Await New 101 Bill, Responses to Tillis Underscore Need for Movement

Last month, we reported on the responses submitted to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) by panelists who participated in the June hearings on the state of U.S. patent eligibility, held by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Along with Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Senator Blumenthal entered a series of questions for the record to be answered by certain participants. While movement on the bill appears to be stalled for the time being, with reports that Tillis and Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) have reinstituted the stakeholder roundtables that led up to the draft bill and hearings in the first place, it’s worth reviewing some of the responses to Tillis’ questions as the IP community waits for the next move. From David O. Taylor’s statistic that 62% of investors he surveyed said they were less likely to invest in companies where patent protection is not available, to Bob Armitage’s characterization of the draft bill’s revision to Section 112(f) as “perfect,” to the Cleveland Clinic’s statement that they are currently less likely to make the necessary investments to bring new advances in diagnostics to market, these responses are a reminder of what’s at stake.

IPWatchdog

August 22, 2019

Amici led by Eli Lilly file brief in Supreme Court in support of Sequenom certiorari petition

Rather than use the word ‘conflate’ to describe the mongrel mixture of patentability requirements the Supreme Court undertook in Mayo, the Eli Lilly brief characterizes the analysis employed by the Supreme Court as including a separate, implicit ‘threshold test’ for patentability that is applied even before consideration of the statutory patentability requirements. Eli Lilly hypothesizes that this ‘implicit exception was imposed to assure that patents cannot validly protect—or preempt access to—laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas.’

Gene Quinn

April 4, 2016

America Invents: How the New Law Impacts Your Patent Practice

The America Invents Act, which just recently passed by the Congress and sent to the White House for President Obama’s signature, is the most significant patent reform legislation in decades, and it promises to change virtually all of patent practice as we know it over the next 18 months. Some pieces of the legislation will go into effect almost immediately,…

Gene Quinn

September 12, 2011