Posts Tagged: "Robert Sterne"

The Board cancelled 95.2% of all claims for which trial was instituted, and cancelled 82.9% of all claims that were initially challenged by the petitioner… These bleak statistics have lead Federal Circuit Chief Judge Randall Rader to at the AIPLA annual meeting in October 2013 call the PTAB “death squads killing property rights.” Then again on Friday, March 21, 2014, at a conference hosted by the George Mason University School of Law, Chief Judge Rader said he was “troubled” by the many differences between proceedings at the PTAB and in the district courts, particularly pointing to the disparities in the treatment of the same evidence concerning the same claims. Rader mentioned that his recent comments about the Board being a “death squad” for patents in contested proceedings may be more accurate than some originally thought, considering the dismal track record for survivability of challenged claims in the first wave of final written decisions.

The “new normal” created by the PTAB has drastically altered the patent assertion landscape. Simply stated, when a patent owner is notified that a patent they own is being brought into a post grant proceeding the statistics, if not the gravity of the threat, suggest that it must be taken seriously immediately and competent representation must be obtained quickly. The burdens are different at the PTAB than they would be in the Federal District Court. Specifically, the PTAB will employ the standard USPTO technique of giving patent claims their broadest reasonable interpretation, which will make it easier for a claim to be determined to overlap with the prior art. Furthermore, in litigation patent claims are presumed valid and the defendant must prove by clear and convincing evidence that a claim is invalid for one or more reasons.

The absolute truth known to everyone in the innovation community is that pioneering innovations become commonplace. What was revolutionary at the time the invention was made becomes taken from granted. In hindsight pioneering innovations look insignificant because they have become ubiquitous. The public, judges and critics find it difficult (assuming they try) to determine whether that which is commonplace today was really, truly obvious decades earlier as of the critical date. Even when an honest and fair obviousness inquiry is undertake it can be exceptionally difficult to put yourself back to before the invention was made in order to determine what was known and what was obvious at the time. But let’s dispense with the ridiculousness, shall we? The overwhelming majority of the world was not at all knowledgeable about or clued into the World Wide Web at the time this innovation was first made. So let’s dispense with the histrionics.