Posts Tagged: "innovators"

On Wednesday, July 5, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) released a summary of the responses it has received to its request for views on whether the country’s system for standard essential patents (SEP) is functioning properly. The goal of the request for comments and the subsequent report is to determine whether the UK government needs to make policy changes in this area. The Office received comments on a variety of topics related to SEPs, including the balance of the system, competition, transparency, patent litigation, and more. While both SEP holders and implementers reported problems in the system, the UKIPO found that there was little consensus among stakeholders as to the efficiency of the system and whether government intervention was needed.

What I tried to do for this presentation is figure out in about seven or eight minutes how I could convey to you what’s really going on in the United States. Because, frankly, it is a mess. The patent system in the United States, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is extraordinarily weakened from where it was 12 years ago. Getting an injunction in the United States is simply not possible anymore in litigation, except for in the most extreme situations. Over the last 12 years, the U.S. patent system largely has become a compulsory licensing system, and increasingly so. This obviously has ramifications for all patent owners. And during this time period, Congress also passed the America Invents Act, which created what’s known as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which has made it more easy to invalidate patents in the United States. As it turns out, 90% of patents that actually get to a final decision at the PTAB are found to have a mistake.

Here we go again! Another day, another ridiculous attack on the U.S. patent system. This time the attack comes from the R Street Institute, who claims that patents are too strong and are inhibiting American companies from achieving success in the race for leadership in the 5G marketplace and continued leadership in Artificial Intelligence (AI). R Street will hold a panel discussion on their wildly outlandish theory, for which they can’t possibly have any factual support, on Tuesday, October 15, in the Capitol Visitor Center. In the announcement they claim that patents are inhibiting American companies because Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei, asserted more than 200 patents against Verizon Communications earlier this year. Therefore—and ipso facto—patents are too strong and American companies are suffering. There may be legitimate security concerns around Huawei’s infrastructure, but to suggest that the company’s patents are at the root of these threats is in a word—Absurd!

Standards-declared patents have been challenged in ex parte and post-grant review for years as part of enforcement efforts and other strategies, though the volume of patents declared essential and their largely unlitigated status has limited the appeal of post-grant challenges against them.  One such standard, High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), promises to be the successor to the current H.264 standard used by most streaming visual media.  As all parties seek to clear risk and license as they implement, developing patent pools have been utilizing new strategies for licensing standard-declared patents. Recently, Unified Patents launched an HEVC zone aimed at encouraging adoption and shedding light on the standard-essential patent (SEP) landscape, and has conducted damages studies, landscape models, and analysis of the patent landscape around the HEVC standard. As part of those efforts, Unified has been challenging patents related to the standard. To date, only a handful of litigations have been filed related to HEVC patents. 

Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) are patents that are unavoidable for the implementation of a standardized technology. They represent core, pioneering innovation that entire industries will build upon. These patents protect innovation that has taken extraordinary effort to achieve. Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) exist as a mechanism for industry innovators to work together to collectively identify and select the best and most promising innovations that will become the foundation for the entire industry to build upon for years to come. Those contributing patented technologies to the development of a standard are asked to provide a FRAND (which stands for Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) assurance, in essence committing to providing access to patents that are or may become essential to the implementation of the standard.

In 1790, the U.S. patent laws were first enacted and individuals could obtain a patent under the new federal government. For about a century beforehand, British citizens in the various parts of the American colonies could obtain patents for that region, and Britain and other European countries had patent laws as well. But the new American patent system was different: it was democratized in that anyone could participate, without the need for consent from the Crown. The origins of patent laws date back to the Fifteenth Century when Florentine regents sought to attract and keep innovators and their inventions. Elizabeth I was a keen ruler in passing various patent laws to encourage foreigners with ideas and inventions to relocate to Britain, as well as encourage domestic innovation.

An unfounded belief persists that entrepreneurs are the primary innovators. However, in a study of the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years up through 2009, as judged by Wharton professors, shows innovations that most affected society were conceived by company workers, not entrepreneurs, according to Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff, a Wharton alum and self-described study author… So in order to encourage innovation, these characteristics of employee-innovators should be developed early on, according to Krippendorff. Logically, not only would that increase the level of innovation but also ease the task of innovation management.

Senator McCain’s remarks related to defense acquisition reform generally, but more specifically related to the need for the Department of Defense to streamline acquisition of new, innovative technologies. McCain told the audience that ”our Defense Department has grown larger but less capable, more complex but less innovative, more proficient at defeating low-tech adversaries but more vulnerable to high-tech ones.” Indeed, with an agency as large as the Department of Defense, a woefully inadequate response to technological advances and adoption of cutting edge innovation should be anticipated.

Earlier today the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on patent reform. The hearing was titled The Impact of Abusive Patent Litigation Practices on the American Economy. There was a variety of diverse views presented by the witnesses, including one witness, Krish Gupta, who continued to cite the bogus and thoroughly debunked Bessen-Meurer “study” that erroneously claims that patent trolls…