Posts in Government

Sen. McCaskill introduced S. 2049 in February 2014 which would require the FTC to promulgate rules to prohibit unfair and deceptive acts and practice in the sending of patent demand letters, including requiring each such letter to identify the patent number, the claims, a description of the manufacturer and model number of each accused product or service, notice that the recipient may have the right to have the manufacturer defend against the infringement, the identity of the person with the right to enforce (including each owner, co-owner, assignee, exclusive licensee, and entity with the authority to enforce the patent, and the ultimate parent entity), any FRAND licensing commitments, any basis for a specific license amount, and each PTO proceeding or litigation involving the patent. Bad faith assertion would be enforceable by the FTC or attorney general of a State in federal court.

The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today commemorated the issuance of the 700,000th design patent during a ceremony with United States Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at Langdon Education Campus in Washington, DC. The patent for the ornamental design for a “Hand-Held Learning Apparatus” was issued to Jason Avery of Berkeley, California and is currently assigned to Emeryville, California-based LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: LF). The ceremony also included the launch of a new Intellectual Property (IP) Patch developed as a joint project between the USPTO, Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital and the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation (IPO).

Last week the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced that they will be holding a roundtable event on April 10, 2014, to discuss President Obama’s desire to find ways to allow the public to provide the Patent Office with prior art… [T]he real problem facing the Patent Office isn’t just that the industry by and large has completely rejected preissuance submissions, but rather the real problem is why. I have repeatedly heard this: “Why would I want to file prior art to help make the patent stronger?” In fact, at a recent conference I heard one attorney who had filed a preissuance submission explain that a strategic decision was made not to file the best prior art because if the patent examiner issues the patent anyway the client decided they wanted to hold on to the best prior art to challenge the patent later.

U.S. patent litigation has followed the centuries-old “American Rule” under which each party to a litigation pays its own legal fees and costs, regardless whether it wins or loses the litigation. A narrow exception exists in patent cases, but only in “exceptional cases” under 35 U.S.C. § 285, such as where the losing party engaged in litigation misconduct, or if the patent was fraudulently procured, or if the losing party raised arguments that were both objectively baseless and made in bad faith. Despite the long tradition of litigants paying their own legal fees and costs, Congress has shown interest in changing the playing field and deviating from the American Rule in patent cases. This comes at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is already considering two cases that relate to the definition of “exceptional cases” in § 285 that may well alter how this existing exception to the American Rule is applied in practice.

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.

KUNIN: ”But what is the one thing that can be a break the bank issue? What if the patent owner asserts eight patents against you in a litigation. Can you pick and choose which are the best patents among the eight to challenge? Or are you going to have to file and pay for eight IPRs? At what particular point does it actually become a financial burden for you to go after every asserted patent against you in that litigation in separate IPRs? Either you can try to strategically determine which are the patents which are most harmful to you and most vulnerable and go after them in IPRs, or try to go after all of them in IPRs. But if you go after all of them, you already explained how expensive it is, all right? So let’s assume for argument sake it’s a fairly complex proceeding and it’s costing $300,000 per IPR. So $300,000 times eight is the total cost. What’s the cost of the litigation in defending against all the asserted patents?”

Oracle’s first version of Java 8 will be released on Tuesday, March 18, 2014. If install Java 8 and encounter authentication issues when trying to use EFS Web or Private PAIR the USPTO says that you will need to revert to Java 7 Update 51.

All of this has to make you wonder whether any new patent legislation is necessary at this time. The House of Representatives has already passed new patent legislation that focuses on patent litigation and the perceived abuses. Reasonable minds can perhaps differ about whether the measures being discussed are good, bad or would do anything to address the manipulation of the judicial process by nefarious actors. The facts suggest, however, that patent litigation is declining and the administrative trials are increasing beyond expectations. This is significant because the administrative trials were created in order to offer defendants a better, cheaper avenue to challenge patents outside of litigation. So why not allow the reforms of the AIA time to work before once again tinkering with the patent laws and potentially upsetting the incentive to innovate?

The goal of the multistakeholder forum is to identify best practices and/or produce voluntary agreements for improving the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system. The IPTF plans to hold several additional meetings throughout the year. The initial meeting will focus on identifying concrete topics to be addressed by participants, and to discuss and make decisions about the process for the forum’s ongoing work. The IPTF aims to have participation from a wide variety of the notice and takedown system’s current users, including right holders and individual creators, service providers, and any other stakeholders that are directly affected – such as consumer and public interest representatives, technical and engineering experts, and companies in the business of identifying infringing content.

This case had been made Special on the Patent Prosecution Highway in October of 2013 because of a favorable Written Opinion from a PCT Searching Authority. For a Special case, USPTO’s case management system normally starts ringing an alarm on the Examiner’s desk after a couple of months. So we should have seen an Office Action at least a month ago, maybe two months ago. But that only works if the case has been assigned to an Examiner. Often the USPTO first assigns the case to a SPE and then it is left to the SPE to figure out which Examiner in the SPE’s art unit should actually examine the case. This case got assigned to the SPE in a particular art unit. Let’s call him “SPE V”. It seems that SPE V decided that this case had been misclassified and should not have gone to his art unit. So he tried to get rid of it.

The view of the USPTO now is that a claim to purified amazonic acid is not patent-eligible because there is no structural difference between the purified acid in the claim and the acid in the leaves, and the claim does not include features that demonstrate that the recited product is markedly different from what exists in nature. … It is, to say the least, unclear why the USPTO, without public consultation seeks to remove the patent-eligibility of isolated or purified natural products of new medical or other utility, which has been taken as a given in the US for 100 years and is consistent with practice in Europe and other major industrialised countries.

The USPTO announces two public hearings in March 2014 to receive feedback about proposed rules concerning the ownership of patents and applications (aka “attributable ownership proposed rules”). The public is invited to attend the hearings in person or via Webcast. Additionally, the public is invited to give testimony in person at the hearings and/or to submit written comments about the proposed rules. The deadline for requesting to give testimony has been extended to Wednesday, March 12, 2014, and the deadline for submitting written comments has been extended until Thursday, April 24, 2014.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that it will host a public forum to discuss the first-inventor-to-file (FITF) provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA). The forum marks the first anniversary of the implementation of FITF, and will be held on March 17, 2014, at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and USPTO Deputy Director Michelle Lee, along with experts from the offices of the Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy and the Deputy Commissioner for Patent Operations, will participate in the event.

It is almost incomprehensible that the Patent Office would put together a litigation resource that ignores the reality that many companies, both large and small, trample on the rights of innovators who have spent large amounts of time, money and energy receive a patent and disclosing their innovation to the world. . . the Patent Office only offers a one-sided help section that gives advice to infringers and sets a tone that comes across as anti-patent and anti-patent owner. This strikes me as fundamentally misguided and clearly demonstrates the anti-patent bias of the Obama Administration. . . I would expect the federal government — the Patent Office that is charged with an important Constitutional duty — to be even handed and empathetic to innovators and patent owners as well.

Currently the President is under fire for Executive Actions, which is something that he railed against when he was Presidential Candidate Obama in 2008, but increasingly embraces. The criticism of the President with respect to Executive Action has heretofore been related to the fact that through executive fiat the President has single handedly re-written laws passed by Congress… No such re-writing of law seems to be implicated in the Executive Actions announced today relative to the patent system. In fact, the Executive Actions on the patent front are largely much ado about nothing and seem most intended to grab headlines. Still, there are a few items that make perfect sense, such as the USPTO working with industry to train patent examiners on cutting edge scientific developments and an expansion of the pro bono program. Still, other initiatives claim to address patent quality but I can’t for the life of me understand how that could be possible. How accurate ownership records kept after the issuance of a patent will help patent quality is a mystery to me, and unexplained by the White House.