Posts Tagged: "interviews"

Talking Trademarks: An Exclusive Interview with INTA’s Debbie Cohn

What follows is our wide ranging discussion, which start out with what Cohn is doing with INTA and then moves into an in depth discussion of issues surrounding counterfeiting, the newly formed Trademark Caucus in Congress, and the recent Federal Circuit decision on disparaging trademark registrations in the so-called Slants case. We ended with the familiar fun questions that give us an opportunity to get to know Cohn.

Getting to Know Tech Geek and Tchaikovsky Fan, Michelle Lee

That leaves the fun questions, which really give us an opportunity to get to know Director Lee, the type of music she listens to, the movies she watches, what she reads and what she enjoys doing in her spare time. We pick up our conversation talking about her recent trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and what captured the imagination of her inner tech geek.

An Exclusive Interview with USPTO Director Michelle Lee

There were no topics ruled out of bounds for this 30 minute interview, not even the Supreme Court’s recent decision to accept cert. in Cuozzo, although as an attorney myself I know better than to ask questions that would have certainly provoked a polite “no comment” response in the face of ongoing litigation. Nevertheless, our conversation was wide ranging. We discussed the release of the Copyright White paper, which among other things recommends expanding eligibility for statutory damages in copyright infringement actions. We also discussed Lee’s recent visit to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the power outage that brought down USPTO electronic filing systems, the Office’s patent quality initiative, the new patent classification system, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and more.

Patents, a system that works – On the record with Bruce Kisliuk

Bruce Kisliuk: “I think over time that pendulum will swing back. I think the nature of the business is that it’s likely going to come by successive case law decisions, I think we’re going slowly see things come back. I think clarity on where the line is on eligibility will get firmer, and I think there will be a stronger appreciation of patent value. It might take some time, maybe by an example — and I hate to think this –because I don’t necessarily want something like this to happen, but government often reacts to disasters. They don’t necessarily see the subtleties. They wait until there’s a disaster and then they react to the disaster and I’d rather not see a true crisis, I’d rather see some course-correction.”

IV founder Edward Jung says US is losing its competitive edge in funding innovative startups

EDWARD JUNG: ”At the other end of that value chain you now have some of the most valuable companies in the entire world in places like China. What stops them from taking all of the value they’ve been able to derive from their over one billion population base, which well capitalizes them, and coming in and competing in the US? The US has not seen so many threats to their industry come from outside the US as opposed to within the US so in that sense I think that’s a whole new set of interesting problems to think about. I’ve actually had encounters with Chinese companies asking if there was some kind of, you know, hidden trick in the way we appear to be opening our market for them to freely come in without any IP barriers. For example, in pairing software and IP and so on and so forth.”