Posts Tagged: "Jerrold Nadler"

On May 1, Representative and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and a bipartisan coalition of members of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law signed a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The letter focuses on antitrust issues posed by Amazon’s alleged use of third-party seller data to develop products competing with those sellers, allegations that directly contradict testimony offered by Amazon last year during a House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing. It also calls upon Bezos to testify before the House Judiciary Committee to clear up any discrepancies between the recent Wall Street Journal article and Amazon’s prior testimony to Congress on the subject of third-party seller data.

Yesterday, 24 law professors, former Chief Judges of the Federal Circuit and former heads of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) sent a letter to Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE) and Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Doug Collins (R-GA) aimed at correcting what the letter characterizes as “misapprehensions of law and misleading rhetoric” on the subject of pending patent reform legislation. The letter makes specific reference to statements made by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claiming that the draft legislation to amend Section 101 of the patent law “if enacted would authorize patenting products and laws of nature, abstract ideas, and other general fields of knowledge.” The authors of yesterday’s letter, which included Retired Federal Circuit Chief Judges Randall Rader and Paul Michel and former USPTO Directors Todd Dickinson and David Kappos, called such statements “profoundly mistaken and inaccurate” and laid out in detail the specific inaccuracies. Rather than expanding the scope of 101 to abstract ideas and laws of nature, said the letter, “the proposed amendments preclude ‘implicit or judicially created exceptions to subject matter eligibility,’” and do not eliminate existing constitutional and statutory bars.

Earlier this week we reported on Lori Cheek, an independent inventor who is defending herself for the second time against accusations brought by Alfred Pirri, Jr. of fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets, among other claims, and who feels like the U.S. patent and legal systems have done her few favors thus far. Following publication of the article, Pirri’s lawyer, Steven Fairchild, sent a letter to IPWatchdog claiming that, since the previous suit was thrown out in pre-trial conference, before discovery or a decision on the merits, the “present suit will uncover the truth of what happened with Mr. Pirri’s invention.” Fairchild specifically points to notarized documents from 2006 that he claims prove Pirri invented the dating cards and their spin-off use for business, which Fairchild says Cheek copied in her other company, Networkd. As mentioned in the previous article, Cheek denies she has ever met Pirri’s therapist, Joanne Richards, whom Pirri claims told Cheek about his idea. She and Richards have signed sworn affidavits attesting to as much, and Cheek insists there is simply no way she could have come in contact with Richards.“Discovery will reveal the truth of the relationship between Ms. Richards and Ms. Cheek,” wrote Fairchild in his letter to IPWatchdog.

In one more example of ways the U.S. patent system can be stacked against the small inventor, we have the story of Lori Cheek, who more than ten years ago had an idea for a unique dating service that she dubbed Cheekd. In 2008, still just prior to the age when people existed via smartphone, the patent she applied for covered a card-based dating system. Cheek decided to leave her steady job as an architect to pursue the idea of a business centered around pre-printed dating cards featuring clever pick-up lines and held a brainstorming session with friends on February 22, 2008. On March 7, 2008, she registered the URL Youvebeencheekd.com (now cheekd.com) with GoDaddy, and officially founded her company, Cheekd, on April 20, 2009. She applied for a patent in 2010 and it was granted on September 24, 2013. A few years later was when the trouble started for Cheek, and today, she is embroiled in her second lawsuit over a patent on a business she is no longer pursuing, both brought by a man, Alfred Pirri, whose first suit was dismissed in pre-trial conference.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Karyn Temple is appointed Register of Copyrights; the International Trade Commission recommends excluding certain iPhone models for infringing Qualcomm patent claims; the EU approves new copyright rules which will affect online media platforms; Senators Tillis and Coons move forward with stakeholder discussions on a legislative fix to Section 101 of patent law; Peloton responds to copyright infringement suit by dropping online cycling classes; Amazon adds nearly 1,000 jobs in Austin, TX; the District of Delaware tosses out willful infringement claims against Intel; and Oracle files opposition asking Supreme Court to deny a petition for writ filed by Google.

With congress out of session this week, it is a good time to meet the members of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, which—unlike the Senate IP Subcommittee—has not yet convened this term. While the House may be largely preoccupied with issues outside the IP realm thus far, other House committees and subcommittees have been actively debating a number of topics relevant to IP. The 116th Congress brings both new and old faces to the Subcommittee with varying levels of IP knowledge and activity. Many of its members, such as Hakeem Jeffries and Zoe Lofgren, are well-versed in IP issues, starting with the full Judiciary Committee Chairman, Jerrold Nadler.