Posts Tagged: "interviews"

”Even a startup with strained resources can afford to file provisional applications. As a result of the American Invents Act and the fact that the United States is now a first inventor to file country, it is advisable for any company to file provisional applications as soon as they have a meaningful invention and have the ability to put it down in an application and file it. So, that would be the most important advice I can give.”

There was a lot of action on this in the last Congress. There is a group of law professors that have expressed some opposition to the proposal to add a civil remedy, in spite of widespread support among industry stakeholders. There was some controversy around some seizure provisions that were suggested in one version of the legislation. And I think those discussions will usefully inform what will be done in this Congress. But I believe there is a great deal of support for making that basic change to allow companies to have another—not a displacement, not preemptive of state law but an additional place to go to get the benefit of nationwide service of process and other special advantages of being in federal court.

During our interview Lee explains that she is supportive of expanding trade agreements currently under consideration in Congress, that she looks forward to working on patent quality and receiving feedback from stakeholders on how the Office can better address patent quality, and she explained that the Office was pleased with the recent Federal Circuit ruling in In re Cuozzo Speed Technologies, which is the first appeal of a final decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in an Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceeding.

With the Euro once again in crisis people look back on the decision to go with the common currency and many people here believe that that was a step too far. That engaging in the expectation that if we do this it will naturally bring us closer together was perhaps way too optimistic. And too risky. And that risking the kind of fiscal instability that we have seen recently in order to push everyone towards a closer political union some people are saying now was a very bad bet to make, without a real supra-national bank and without having first knitted the countries together better politically.

An interview with Jim Pooley, former Deputy Director General of WIPO – The actual changes that we might have to accept in a truly globalized, harmonized system are not going to be that difficult for us. The real difficulty is getting everybody to agree on one set of best practices. That, it turns out, is a political road that is just as difficult now as it ever has been. But the goal is clear, the goal is compelling and I think all of us need to work as hard as we can to push things in that direction. First of all we’ve got to get the industrialized countries to agree on a single approach, or at least an understood and aligned approach, to a grace period. Once that happens I think the other issues that we have to deal with will fall into place. We have to keep in mind that while the politicians or diplomats argue with one another, we have sitting on the sidelines all of our clients who are cheering for harmonization. They want to see this happen. And at the end of the day politicians need to recognize it’s the users of the patent system that own it and we need to make sure that they get the system that they deserve.

Phil Hartstein is the President and CEO of Finjan Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: FNJN)… On January 6, 2015, I interviewed Hartstein, which appears below. We had a wide ranging and lively discussion about the current state of the patent market, how the pejorative use of the term “patent troll” does nothing but attempt to denigrate innovators as second-class patent owners simply because they don’t manufacture, efforts to promote ethical licensing standards, and patent reform.

If you have any software patent that is essentially a software version of a human practice — something that was done in human practice — and you decide to write up a patent, even if you automated it in such a way and did things that the human brain could never do it will be problematic. If you can look at the patent and then make an argument that humans were doing this outside the software realm before you implemented it in software, under Alice, I think you’ve got a big problem.

They use early IPOs as an alternative to traditional venture funding. But one of the things that the investors place a huge importance on is a very sophisticated, robust patent operation. So whereas it used to be you’d have a new company and it could take years even to get some sort of sophistication, we’re now doing it on day one. And the results have been great to see. Over the last few months we have filed close to a hundred patent applications for these entities. We’re able to do that because we have been able to negotiate favorable deals with the law firms we use and we can pass that on to the clients. So our goal is to really be creating companies and crafting their portfolios from day one. Essentially, my partner and I work to insource a very sophisticated patent operation for a company that ordinarily wouldn’t have had that capability.

It’s important, particularly for technology companies in fast moving industries, to keep their eyes focused on the future and competing in the marketplace rather than focused on the past and competing in the courtroom, other than in a small number of cases where that focus really is absolutely necessary… When we deal with nonpracticing entities in mediation, we have to take them seriously. They are the parties to the lawsuit. They operate the kinds of businesses that they operate. They take positions and have underlying interests that need to be acknowledged as real and sincere. And the parties opposing the nonpracticing entities have to deal with them straight up and sometimes make some difficult decisions as to whether to settle and how much money to pay.

The first thing we do is we assess the idea. And when we assess the idea we verify that the idea can lead to the creation of intellectual property. Because for me, if that’s not the outcome, then it’s not an idea worth pursuing. The second thing we’re looking for is merit. So we’re checking: is that a good idea? From my experience of 20 years in Silicon Valley, it all really comes down to the connection between the idea and the founder. Some people are trying to sell somebody else’s ideas. That’s not a good idea.