Posts Tagged: "interviews"

LEMLEY: “I think Alice is a real sea change on the patentable subject matter issue. I’ve heard a lot of folks talk about how Alice doesn’t really use the word “software” so it doesn’t really change anything, but I honestly think that’s wishful thinking… I think a lot of patent lawyers had talked ourselves into thinking that the Court didn’t really mean it in Mayo when it talked about having to add a significant inventive component beyond the abstract idea or the natural process. But the court in Alice makes it clear that if your patent covers an implementation of an idea we want proof of an inventive concept beyond that idea before we’ll grant you a patent.

“[F]or a living I reverse engineer code and testify in court. Yet I could not reverse engineer this code. Every time I touched it to make some kind of change to test it, the whole thing broke. And I finally had to write the code completely from scratch because this open source code was such a kludge, such a mess, that it was impossible for me to figure out… [T]here’s a bunch of issues here and maybe some of them are that programmers nowadays aren’t well trained and they’re not well disciplined in programming techniques… [they] write code as quickly as you can, throw it out there, people will debug it for you. So first of all maybe we need to be teaching more discipline to programmers. We need to… convince them, hey, now that you’ve really gone through a rigorous program it’s not just okay to throw stuff together but create something with a structure that’s debuggable, that’s understandable, and that is innovative and patentable.”

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Bob Zeidman, the president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, who is also the president and founder of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation, Zeidman is an software expert. In fact, in addition to consulting with lawyers and technology companies, he is an testifying and consulting expert witness. The premise of our conversation was the upheaval in the patent industry thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. In part 1 of our conversation we discussed the decision and ways that attorneys can build a specification to satisfy the Alice standard. In part 2 of our 3 part discussion, which appears below, we wrap up our discussion of the Alice decision and dive into a discussion about the fact that many in the computer science world don’t believe what they do to be particularly innovative or even special.

Modern software tools allow people to turn fairly abstract ideas into reality. That’s the beauty of software. You can start describing things in such a high level and yet output what I consider an innovative invention. And so how do we separate abstract ideas that are unpatentable from an actual software implementation is going to be really difficult. And I don’t think this ruling helps…. One of the reasons there’s an explosion in software patents is that it’s really easy to create a software patent without having written the code. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But I do know, I have seen patents where there have been code snippets that don’t work. And I think that’s one thing to be careful of.

Judge Michel: “I’m aghast at the suggestions that are made in some blogs that the Federal Circuit be abolished. The idea that you need more so-called percolation by having different appellate courts take different views on patent laws is completely crazy in my opinion. There’s plenty of percolation just within the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court doesn’t seem to have the slightly problem identifying cases where they feel that corrections are needed. Look, I don’t think the Federal Circuit’s perfect. I’m glad there is a Supreme Court. And whether I agree with Alice or don’t agree with Alice or love KSR or didn’t love KSR is really beside the point. Every power center needs some supervision over them. In the case of the Congress it’s the voters. In the case of the court it’s the Supreme Court, or a higher court in the hierarchy. And I think that’s all well and good. So the Federal Circuit isn’t perfect but I think it’s a very good court. I think it’s been a huge improvement over the chaos of before 1982 and the various regional circuits. And so I hope we don’t over correct by getting rid of the Federal Circuit.”

Ray Niro: “The Administration has become a shill for Google — you even have a Google person running the Patent Office. So you have a situation where any number of patents, tens of thousands of patents, are going to be affected by Alice and also by the Limelight decision on split infringement.”

“Our promise to the small or medium size operating company is we will give them a simple and affordable way to understand the patent environment they’re doing business in, to find the hundred patents that are most statistically relevant to their product line. And provide them with either a license or a warranty that allows them to reduce the risk they’re facing on those one hundred patents. And if you’re a small or medium size operating company who is coming to understand that every business needs an IP strategy these days as IP becomes a more important part of markets and the economy then this is a very affordable and simple entry level strategy for understanding and dealing with patent risk. And that puts you in a much better position arguably than the position that you’re in right now which is you know very little about the risk you’re facing and you can do nothing about it.”

Ray Niro is one of the most well know patent litigators in the country. In some circles is may be referred to as “infamous,” and in other circles he may be simply referred to as famous. It all depends upon whether he is your attorney or whether he is the attorney on the other side… I noticed an announcement that he and his firm are now offering flat fee defense representation in patent litigation matters. Ray Niro defending a patent infringement case? I have to admit I didn’t realize he did defense work, so I wanted to talk to him about this new business model. He agreed.

Under the AIA and through its own initiatives, the USPTO has developed many programs that facilitate the prosecution of applications through the Office. Applicants should consider the usefulness of these programs in any on-going and newly filed U.S. patent applications.

KUNIN: ”But what is the one thing that can be a break the bank issue? What if the patent owner asserts eight patents against you in a litigation. Can you pick and choose which are the best patents among the eight to challenge? Or are you going to have to file and pay for eight IPRs? At what particular point does it actually become a financial burden for you to go after every asserted patent against you in that litigation in separate IPRs? Either you can try to strategically determine which are the patents which are most harmful to you and most vulnerable and go after them in IPRs, or try to go after all of them in IPRs. But if you go after all of them, you already explained how expensive it is, all right? So let’s assume for argument sake it’s a fairly complex proceeding and it’s costing $300,000 per IPR. So $300,000 times eight is the total cost. What’s the cost of the litigation in defending against all the asserted patents?”

KUNIN: ”Remember though an Act of Congress in 1982 the Federal Circuit was established as the single reviewing court for district court patent appeals to provide uniformity and consistency in the development of the patent laws. And for a couple of decades it was pretty much left unsupervised by the Supreme Court to let the patent law develop more consistency. But now if you look back from 2014 you see that there’s been a sea change in how the Supreme Court has exercised its supervisory role. This may be in part due to the intra-court disagreements in the Federal Circuit decision-making inviting the Supreme Court to take a case. We see that systematically there seems to be a desire of the Supreme Court to get the Federal Circuit, in the area of patent law, to apply general law principles. No special rules for patent cases need exist for legal aspects that are not unique to the patent statutes.”

GROSSMAN: “I think that we will see some form of patent litigation reform passed by the Senate and then ultimately by Congress. Currently, there are very few things on which the Republicans and the Democrats can come together. However, patents and other types of intellectual property seem to be one area in which joint action is possible. I think that ultimately both parties are going to want to do something that shows that they can work together and get something important accomplished. Enacting the appropriate type of patent litigation reform would foster innovation and create jobs and thereby demonstrate to the American people that they still have a functioning Congress. The House has already passed a bill, and the President urged Congress to pass a bill in his State of the Union address. I think the momentum is there.”

MUELLER: “I think a lot is going to ride on what we see going forward from the PTAB, for example decisions in post grant review. Will those decisions be high quality and will the courts respect them? We know that the Office has hired some really good folks but they’ve also been hampered by the sequestration. I’m delighted that Michelle Lee has taken the reins. I sure hope that’s going to be permanent. I think she’ll do an outstanding job and be highly respected. But I also think a lot of attention is going to be paid to what happens as those post grant review decisions start coming out.”

CHISUM: “I’m very skeptical when Congress starts talking about reform. I don’t think there is enough sophistication in Congress and among committee staff members about how the patent system really operates and about the challenges the many thousands of people operating the system face. Most of the legislative efforts I’ve seen over the last 30 years to reform the patent system, in fact, reformed very little. The “reforms” have tended to respond to particular interest groups, to particular complainants. Congress has tended to respond only to a consensus that something was wrong rather than thinking outside the box as to what will really improve the efficiency and predictability of the patent system.”

There was nothing off the table for discussion in this interview. We discuss how and why he choose McDermott, as well as what it was like working for David Kappos and working with Judge Ray Chen when he was Solicitor at the USPTO. We also discuss the future of the Patent Office, the appointment of Michelle Lee to be Deputy Director of the USPTO, substantively what the USPTO was trying to do with respect to post grant procedures, the new ethical rules applicable to Patent Attorneys and Agents, and a variety of other issues.