Posts Tagged: "House IP Subcommittee"

The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet met today to hear from a number of witnesses about the intersection of intellectual property rights and consumers’ right to repair products they own. The concerns voiced by witnesses and congress members today centered around harm and cost to consumers as a result of technological protection measures (TPMs) and increased use of IP tools such as design patents to thwart competition for after-market parts.

The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet today held a hearing titled “IP and Strategic Competition with China: Part II – Prioritizing U.S. Innovation Over Assisting Foreign Adversaries,” which focused on the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) agreement on a waiver of IP rights for COVID-19 vaccine technologies under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) last June. All of the panelists agreed that COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency and that an extension of the waiver to diagnostics and therapeutics is likely unnecessary.

In response to last week’s hearing of the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on copyright law, former Copyright Office General Counsel, Jon Baumgarten, submitted a letter this week to the Subcommittee expressing his concerns with the testimony of one of the witnesses, Sy Damle of Latham & Watkins, who also formerly served as U.S. Copyright Office General Counsel. The letter was published in full on the Copyright Alliance website.

The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet today held the first of several planned hearings about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on intellectual property, focusing in this initial hearing on copyright law. The witnesses included three artists, a professor, and an attorney with varying perspectives on the matter, although the artists all expressed similar concerns about the potentially dire effects of generative AI (GAI) applications on their respective industries and careers.

Today’s hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet on Oversight of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) demonstrated some confusion on the part of Congress about the intent of USPTO Director Kathi Vidal’s recent Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on changes to Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) processes, and suggested the Subcommittee members believe she may be exceeding her authority.

Shortly after the Republican membership of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet was announced, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, released the Democratic rosters for each subcommittee. Below, we profile the Democrats who will occupy the House IP Subcommittee during the 118th Congress, including Representatives hailing from a well-known research district in North Carolina and a California lawmaker whose home district lays claim to a major space R&D laboratory.

Following an incredibly contentious vote for Speaker of the House, it has taken some time for Congressional subcommittees to take shape. However, at least the Republican membership of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet has taken shape in recent days, featuring a couple of well-known politicians whose efforts on patent system reforms have represented the interests of either end of the world of IP system stakeholders. The House IP Subcommittee during the 118th Congress also contains several incoming Representatives, including a few that have had some engagement with IP matters prior to joining the subcommittee.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet today held Part II in a series of hearings to consider reforms to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) 10 years after it was created by the America Invents Act (AIA). The hearing, titled “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board After 10 Years, Part II: Implications of Adjudicating in an Agency Setting,” coincided with the release of a preliminary report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that was commissioned in June of last year by IP Subcommittee Chair Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) to investigate PTAB decision-making practices. The GAO’s preliminary findings revealed that “the majority of [administrative patent] judges (75 percent) surveyed by GAO responded that the oversight practiced by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) directors and PTAB management has affected their independence, with nearly a quarter citing a large effect on independence.”

Three days out from Election Day, 2020, there are still many votes left to be counted, but as of the time of publication, it seems Joe Biden is likely to take the U.S. Presidency. IPWatchdog explored what a Biden presidency might mean for intellectual property (IP) yesterday, but there were also important wins in the Senate and House that are worth noting. Overall, the key U.S. Senators and Congress members who have been most active on IP issues in recent years seem to have retained their seats, and leadership of the IP Subcommittees remains intact. How a new administration will change the makeup of these subcommittees and whether potential new leadership in the House following the Democrats’ failure to make the gains they’d hoped they would remain open questions.

This week features a busy schedule of hearings on Capitol Hill involving technology, innovation and intellectual property topics. In the House of Representatives, the House Financial Services Committee will get their chance to vet Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency, while other hearings focus on wireless spectrum policy, antitrust issues posed by Internet platforms, as well as issues facing the U.S. trademark system, including counterfeits and register cluttering. In the Senate, Google censorship, oversight of the U.S. Copyright Office and NASA’s plans to send a manned mission to Mars will be under the microscope. Elsewhere, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explores the current state of robotics and how they can help American productivity.

Last week, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, held an oversight hearing on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) with Director Andre Iancu as the sole witness. A particular inquiry from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) regarding the USPTO’s allegedly lax examination quality under 35 U.S.C. § 112 caught my attention. She remarked [at 1:33:30]:  “Theranos, the blood testing company whose founder is being investigated for fraud, was granted nearly 100 patents based on an invention that didn’t work; and it concerns me that a patent application for an invention that doesn’t work gets approved.”  She generally questioned examiners’ attention to Section 112 requirements. Rep. Lofgren’s statement was no doubt primed by information from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the Ars Technica blog post titled “Theranos: How a broken patent system sustained its decade-long deception.” In this article, the author, who was introduced as holding the “Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents” at EFF, declares with no evidence or proof, that the “USPTO generally does a terrible job of ensuring that applications meet the utility and enablement standards.” The article cited no study, identified no patent, nor any claim to any “invention that didn’t work.” This outrageous, baseless allegation is outright reckless and irresponsible.

Last week, the House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet convened a hearing to perform oversight of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. USPTO Andrei Iancu fielded questions on Section 101 patent eligibility issues and fraudulent trademark application filings and, while several Representatives on the subcommittee noted Director Iancu’s procedural changes at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), much of the previous backlash to those changes seemed to have dissipated. In his opening statement, Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA), Chairman of the House IP Subcommittee, discussed the impact that issued patents have on small businesses, noting that the first patent granted to a startup results in the business both hiring an average of 16 employees and earning an average of $10.6 million in additional sales within five years. However, Johnson added that recent case law from the U.S. Supreme Court have resulted in major issues with patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101, threatening innovation in critical technology areas like medical diagnostics. He was also concerned by a rise in fraudulent trademark filings coming from China that can hurt American businesses trying to register legitimate marks.

Today, April 3, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held a hearing titled Trailblazers and Lost Einsteins: Women Inventors and the Future of American Innovation—a topic that also was considered last Wednesday by the House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet in their first hearing of the term. The House hearing was titled, Lost Einsteins: Lack of Diversity in Patent Inventorship and the Impact on America’s Innovation Economy and, like today’s Senate hearing, focused on a recent report on female inventorship released by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and featured testimony on how to improve rates of female inventorship from a collection of women in fields having strong ties to the U.S. patent system. Susie Armstrong, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Qualcomm, Inc., said that, for companies like hers that were trying to take the lead in 5G mobile networks and other areas of innovation, more great tech minds from underrepresented communities were needed. An inventor herself who helped create single packet data communications that allowed cell phones to access the Internet for the first time, Armstrong said that Qualcomm had produced educational initiatives like the Thinkabit Lab, which partners with school districts and libraries to encourage students to innovate in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector.