Posts Tagged: "Andrei Iancu"

Former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Andrei Iancu, who is now a partner with Irell & Manella, told attendees of an Orrin G. Hatch Foundation webinar today that many of the proposals in the USPTO’s recent Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practices should be legislated by Congress. Particularly on issues that were statutorily prescribed, such as the standard patents are reviewed under at the PTAB versus the courts, the timing for filing petitions, and who can bring an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding, Iancu said the better route to certainty is through Congress.

In a webinar hosted today by the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), the organization’s founders, Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, both former Directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), spoke with former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, about the increased skepticism surrounding a plan to extend the waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics. According to Kappos, while World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries were supposed to decide on December 17 whether to extend the waiver, “given the rising opposition and other countries starting to raise their hands” with questions, “it’s seeming likely the WTO will defer its decision until the New Year.”

On Wednesday night, during a launch event for the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) announced that he has come on as a co-sponsor of the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2022. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the first draft of his bill in August, but had no co-sponsors at the time, which caused some to question the chances of the bill passing anytime soon. But tonight, Coons said he is happy to be a co-sponsor and both Coons and Tillis seemed optimistic about the prospects for intellectual property legislation in the next congress—no matter which of them ends up as Chair.

A new intellectual property (IP) organization launched today will be headed by former vice president of U.S. policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC), Frank Cullen, and features a Board of Directors comprised of bipartisan frontrunners in the IP realm. The Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) will aim to educate on the importance of innovation to the U.S. economy at a high level, and to fill the void its creators say exists with respect to clarifying the often-negative public narrative about the role of IP in access to innovation. The Board includes former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, Retired U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Kathleen O’Malley and Retired CAFC Chief Judge Paul Michel.

In consultation with Chief Judge Paul Michel, IPWatchdog is pleased to announce that Andrei Iancu, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, and current partner at Irell & Manella, has been selected as the 2022 recipient of The Paul Michel Award. He will be presented with the award on Sunday evening, September 11, 2022, at IPWatchdog LIVE 2022. The Paul Michel Award, created with the blessing of Chief Judge Paul Michel (CAFC, ret.), is awarded annually to someone within the IP community who has selflessly served the best interests of the industry and its members as a respected leader, mentor, and advocate on behalf of fairness and for the best interests of the intellectual property system.

The third day of IPWatchdog’s PTAB Masters™ 2022 featured more from former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, as well as panels covering topics such as avoiding obviousness mistakes, appellate strategies from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and other intricacies of PTAB practice from the experts. Panelists this afternoon also weighed in on today’s announcement that Justice Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court, opening the door for Biden to appoint a replacement.

The first panel of Tuesday’s PTAB Masters™ 2022, titled “Discretionary Denials: Has the WDTX Been Neutered?”, presented data that reveals the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) seemingly stopped citing Fintiv as a reason to discretionarily deny inter partes review (IPR) proceedings for cases with parallel litigation in the Western or Eastern Districts of Texas (WD of TX/ ED of TX) during the last four months of 2021. While the PTAB issued a larger number of institution decisions overall in those months compared with previous months, and a larger number of cases citing Fintiv, there was also a relatively low number of cases across all jurisdictions in which discretion to deny was applied based on the Fintiv analysis.

The first day of IPWatchdog’s PTAB Masters™ 2022 program featured a welcome from Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, who told attendees that Congress should consider codifying some of the reforms made by former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu in order to better avoid “gamesmanship” at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Tillis specifically called out entities like OpenSky Industries, who last December petitioned the PTAB to institute an IPR proceeding challenging claims from one of two patents involved in VLSI Technologies’ $2.175 billion jury verdict for patent infringement against Intel, which was handed down in March 2021 in the Western District of Texas.

A webinar hosted on Tuesday, January 12, by The Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project featured former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, as well as Duke University Professor of Law and former USPTO Administrator of the Office of External Affairs Arti Rai, discussing the proposal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive IP rights under the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement for certain COVID-19 technologies. While all three panelists agreed that the IP waiver discussion has become a distraction that will not solve the fundamental problems, Iancu and Kappos were especially passionate that the precedent set by the U.S. government’s decision to back the proposal could do very real harm, rather than good.

In early November, the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Law held its 65th Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference. The program consisted of five plenary sessions and ten breakout sessions featuring candid discussions and networking sessions with judges, senior government officials, and leaders of supranational IP offices, multinational corporations, law firms, academia, and nonprofit organizations. IPWatchdog’s Founder and CEO, Gene Quinn, moderated the second plenary session, “Global Patent Issues.” The program kicked off with a featured panel consisting of Andrei Iancu, Partner at Irell & Manella, Former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, and Former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; the Honorable Paul R. Michel (ret.), former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; and Brad Watts, Minority Chief Counsel for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Professor Daryl Lim, Director of UIC’s Center for Intellectual Property, Information and Privacy Law, moderated the discussion.

Former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, and former Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, today released a White Paper calling the Biden Administration’s decision to support a waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID-19-related technologies under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) “strategic folly.” The report was produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In the paper, titled “The Shot Heard around the World”, the three officials, two of whom served under the Obama Administration, explained that the United States must indeed ramp up its efforts to improve vaccine diplomacy and to distribute more vaccines globally, but that “[w]aiving IP protections would not lead to the manufacture of a single additional dose of a vaccine.” Instead, they proposed a number of alternative solutions to solve the “real problems.”

The extreme uncertainty that U.S. patent eligibility “validity goulash” jurisprudence has caused is wreaking havoc on inventors, especially those working on emerging technologies. It is also hindering patent owners’ ability to enforce their property rights, investment and licensing deal-making, and giving China advantages in global competitiveness. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. Those were takeaways from the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund’s (EFELDF) “The Sorry State of Patentability: ‘Anything Under the Sun Made by Man’ No More” program in Washington, D.C. The September 29 event’s panelists considered patent eligibility from the Chakrabarty decision, which ruled a manmade living microorganism was patent-eligible, to dubious, damaging, judicially-created exceptions in such cases as Bilski, Mayo, Alice, Myriad and American Axle. The participants made painfully clear that the Alice-Mayo Framework doesn’t work and course correction is long overdue.

On Monday of IPWatchdog LIVE in Dallas, a panel on “The TRIPS IP Waiver: Separating Fact & Fiction” was moderated by president and CEO of the PCT learning center and founding partner of Berenato & White, John White, and featured IP leaders Andrei Iancu, Patrick Kilbride, and Chris Israel. The Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement is an international agreement among members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which sets minimum standards in the international rules governing intellectual property. In 2020, India and South Africa proposed a TRIPS Agreement waiver proposal that would temporarily waive intellectual property rights protections for technologies needed to prevent, contain, or treat COVID-19, including vaccines and vaccine-related products. The proposal has been hotly contested globally, but the Biden Administration said in May of this year that the United States would back it.

At today’s Heritage Foundation event in Washington, D.C., titled Restoring American Leadership in Patent Law and Innovation Policy, former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director (USPTO) Andrei Iancu began by lamenting the failure of decision makers to make the connection between intellectual property and innovation. Increasingly, policy makers think innovation just happens, Iancu explained, with too many believing monetization happens after the fact, rather than driving innovation. “Without IP, the free market does not participate, or does not participate to scale,” Iancu told the Heritage audience. Laurie Self, Senior Vice President and Counsel, Government Affairs, Qualcomm, agreed with Iancu and added that, without a strong patent system, there is no opportunity to maintain a strong innovation leadership position. Presumably alluding to developments such as the Biden Administration’s support for waiving IP rights under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) related to COVID-19 inventions and the recent Executive Order on Competition, Self said: “We are seeing a series of policies that if implemented would undermine our system… this cognitive dissonance is a threat.”