Aaric Eisenstein Image

Aaric Eisenstein

Vice President

PMC

Aaric Eisenstein is Vice President of PMC. Mr. Eisenstein focuses on patent strategy and licensing. Mr. Eisenstein, who joined the company in 2012, has extensive experience in early-stage companies. Most recently, he founded Publishing Revenues, a sales and marketing consultancy for high-profile authors and media figures. Other technology experience includes positions with LibreDigital and Stratfor, where he was SVP of Publishing and Chief Innovation Officer. Mr. Eisenstein received his BA in Political Economy from Williams College and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Recent Articles by Aaric Eisenstein

A Patent Dream Come True

The US Patent Office – of which the PTAB is a part – issues patents.  That’s why it exists.  So if the PTAB finds an error in a granted patent, fix it.  Maybe that fix renders the patent so narrow it’s worthless in the market.  If so, that’s the applicant’s issue.  The point is that all the components of the Patent Office should be resources for inventors, not adversaries, working to issue valid patents.  As Director Iancu says, “It is a new day at the PTAB! All these enhancements advance Dir. Iancu’s underlying theme, forcefully emphasized at numerous venues over the last months:  Cherish our patent system’s enabling capabilities, and as necessary, propose narrowly-tailored solutions that address actual shortcomings.  In other words, ex ante, would anyone have seriously proposed the Alice decision as the most surgical way to deal with abusive demand letters sent to coffee shops?

The Real IPR Gauntlet: What USPTO Statistics Don’t Show

87.2% of patents in the study, per the table, were subjected to just 1 or 2 IPR petitions – so gang tackling is no big deal. But make this simple observation: If a patent is killed in its first IPR, it can’t possibly be considered for a second one. The USPTO keeps their denominator fixed (and too large), which artificially lessens the reported percentage of patents which have large numbers of petitions filed against them. The calculation shouldn’t be 55/4,376 = 1.3% because by the time a patent faces its 7th(!) IPR petition, the universe of eligible-for-challenge patents is much smaller than during the first petition.