Posts Tagged: "innovation"

Report Recommends Worker-Centric Competitiveness Approach to Trade Policy

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) this week released a report titled “A Worker-Centric Trade Agenda Needs to Focus on Competitiveness, Including Robust IP Protections.” The ITIF is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute that focuses on technological innovation and public policy. The report explained that U.S. trade policy has long been contentious. Traditionally, trade policy prioritized U.S. consumer interests. However, in response to a decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs and output due to unbalanced trade, President Biden raised a “worker-centric trade agenda,” turning away from this traditional approach. In his shift to a “worker-centric trade agenda,” the report recommended that President Biden should reject the counsel of anti-corporate, anti-trade progressives who deny that U.S. companies’ interests align with U.S. workers’ interests. A new competitiveness-focused approach to trade policy can support both.

The SECRETS Act Adds a Critical New Defense Against IP Theft Threatening U.S. Tech Leadership

Intellectual property (IP) theft, especially of trade secrets, remains a significant threat to advanced U.S. industries, global competitiveness, and national security. It is foundational to the U.S. trade dispute with China, given state-sponsored efforts to steal as much American know-how as possible. Yet, instead of new laws and regulations, the United States has relied mainly on tariffs in an indirect effort to convince China to curb these illegal practices. That is, until now. As Congress and the Biden administration prepare to finalize competitiveness bills and set the country’s annual defense budget, they have an opportunity to advance another bill that will benefit American businesses and workers by combatting the Chinese threat to U.S. industries—the SECRETS Act, introduced last summer by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Todd Young (R-IN).

GIPC’s Tenth International IP Index: Reasons to Be Hopeful, But More Work to Do

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today revealed its 2022 International IP Index, “Compete for Tomorrow,” which is now in its tenth edition. Last year, the report focused on the role of effective intellectual property (IP) frameworks in helping economies to combat and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and identified several emerging economies that had made significant improvements. This year, the report analyzes ten years of data, which reveals that the global IP environment has steadily improved overall, including in the last two years of turmoil, and that emerging economies are particularly making a conscious decision to bolster their IP regimes.

Thaler Loses AI-Authorship Fight at U.S. Copyright Office

In an opinion letter dated February 14, 2022, the Review Board of the United States Copyright Office (Review Board) affirmed a decision of the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) denying registration of a two-dimensional artwork generated by Creativity Machine, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm created by Dr. Stephen Thaler. Established by regulation in 1995, the Review Board is responsible for hearing final administrative appeals following two opportunities for a claimant to appeal copyright registration refusals. Thaler filed an application to register the computer-generated work, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” on November 3, 2018. On the application, Thaler listed Creativity Machine as the author of the work and indicated himself to be the claimant, with a transfer statement explaining he acquired ownership of the work because of his “ownership of the machine.”

Original Claims to Award-Winning Wireless Mic Tech Found Obvious at CAFC, But Narrowed Claims Upheld

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) agreed with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) decision that the original claims of Zaxcom’s U.S. Patent No. 9,336,307 for Engineering Emmy® and technical OSCAR award-winning wireless microphone technology were unpatentable as obvious. However, the court upheld the substitute claims Zaxcom had proposed. Zaxcom appealed the PTAB’s decision on the original claims in May of 2020, arguing that the PTAB misconstrued the patent claims and failed to properly consider evidence of industry praise.