Posts Tagged: "President Donald Trump"

Once we go down a path of government price controls and compulsory licensing we will have foregone opportunities for other, more rational policy choices and will soon find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Of course, making prescription drugs more affordable must be an important, shared goal. But the solutions we pursue cannot risk choking off America’s innovative ecosystem that leads the world in discovering new cures and treatments. As Nobel laureate and NIH Director Harold Varmus said in 1995, one must first have a new drug to price before one can worry about how to price it.  Letting our federal government import foreign price controls and expropriate patents is not the way to go about it.

This damaging narrative, which portrays inventors in an incredibly disrespectful way, has been allowed to infect the highest levels of our nation’s government… Aside from the specific classes being targeted by these different monikers, it would seem that the use of the term “patent troll” is not much different than the use of the terms “superpredators” or “deplorables.” Each of them is a gross over-generalization of groups of people that have turned out to be incredibly demeaning and evidence a great misunderstanding of certain political realities. Many Americans are right to be outraged over the long-term effects of harsh law enforcement policies on underprivileged communities. Will they show any similar outrage over the steep decline of the U.S. patent system and our nation’s innovation economy directly attributable to the use of the “patent troll” narrative?

While Jack Johnson is most well known as a the first African-American to be heavyweight boxing champion, he was also an inventor and entrepreneur. The crime Johnson was convicted of was transporting a white woman across state lines for an immoral purpose. Johnson was married three times, each time to a white woman.

President Trump’s recently halting Broadcom from a hostile takeover of Qualcomm is good news for American national security. Some have cast the administration’s intervention as “protectionism.”  Those people are ignoring the main point. The president’s order preserving the U.S. firm’s independence acted, as the Wall Street Journal said, on “national-security concerns in this case [that] are legitimate.” … Had Mr. Trump not stopped Broadcom, U.S.-based technology may not set the standards — and level of security — adopted for 5G telecommunications infrastructure. A weakened, dismantled Qualcomm could be overtaken by China’s national champion, Huawei. Congressional concerns over Huawei products’ security and privacy vulnerabilities, as well as the company’s intimacy with the Chinese government, have kept its phones and equipment out of U.S. stores.

The European Commission has recently proposed new tax rules that would significantly alter the tax regime faced by technology companies operating in the European Union, including American tech giants like Google and Facebook. The proposal from European authorities would tax tech company revenues in the country where those revenues are generated rather than where the companies are regionally located; supporters of the proposal note that this would keep tech companies from reducing tax payments by locating regional headquarters in European nations with lower tax levels.

Artist Matt Furie, the creator of the Pepe the Frog anthropomorphic frog character that has gained notoriety for its use in Internet memes, filed a complaint for copyright infringement in the Central District of California. The suit targets a pair of companies managed by far-right conservative radio show host Alex Jones over the use of the Pepe character over the sale of a poster including a likeness of Pepe alongside political figures from the alt-right and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Competitors like Mylan and Teva, rather than inventing better treatments or cures for dry eyes chose the shortcut. They attacked Allergan’s patent in the PTAB. Allergan responded by assigning their patent to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe who in turn invoked sovereign immunity at the PTAB, and demanded their rights in a real court with a real judge and jury. Mylan, Teva, the PTAB, Congress, and class action lawyers have formed a mob to gang up on Allergan for defending their intellectual property rights. They filed hundreds of suits accusing Allergan and the Tribe of fraud, conspiracy, and sham transactions stemming from an “invalid” patent. The attackers are mistakenly focusing on the patent as the problem. The problem is not the patent, but rather all of the incentives that reward copying instead of innovating.

It is no surprise to anyone that patent rights in the United States suffered enormously under the two terms served in the White House by President Barack Obama. That the Obama White House was uncomfortably close with Google is widely known, and Google has been the face and driving force of the lobby that supports weakening patent rights in America. What is far less clear, and extremely difficult to explain or understand, is why the Department of Justice continues to make arguments against patents. Indeed, in the DOJ brief filed in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy, the Solicitor General argues repeatedly throughout the brief that patents are not private property, but rather are a public right… At the very beginning of the brief filed by the DOJ in Oil States, in the Summary of the Argument, the DOJ stakes its claim and beings by arguing that patents are a public right (not private property) that is akin to a government-conferred franchise.

A group of 16 leaders from politically conservative institutions sent a letter addressed to President Donald Trump lauding the Trump Administration’s decision last summer to initiate an investigation into Chinese trade practices regarding intellectual property. The investigation, authorized under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, was aimed at identifying instances where U.S. technologies have been forcibly transferred to Chinese entities as a cost of entering the Chinese domestic market as a foreign entity… The recent letter to President Trump from conservative leaders is the latest indication that right-leaning institutions and think tanks have been more engaged with the debate surrounding the current U.S. intellectual property system.

On Monday, February 5, 2018, the United States Senate will hold a confirmation vote on Andrei Iancu, President Trump’s pick to become the next Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Conservative leaders wrote the White House applauding this initiative, based on the property rights implications of IP expropriation. These conservative leaders note that China is hardly the only country that steals American IP, and such IP theft imposes significant costs to our economy, impairs American competitiveness and compromises our innovative future… The letter reads in part: “The 301 investigation represents a good first step toward asserting rules-based accountability and recommitting to an American IP-based competition policy. However, trade enforcement is only one pillar of an American economic competitiveness plan.”

President Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate a tenth wave of judicial nominees. Among those nominated today for positions on the federal judiciary were Acting FTC Chair Maureen Ohlhausen, who was nominated to become a judge on the United States Court of Federal Claims.

In mid-August, the Trump Administration announced that it would probe the alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property as aided by the Chinese federal government. One could assume that this probe might be a topic of conversation. During this conversation President Trump should ask President Xi to explain how a Communist regime is capable of having a better understanding of the importance of protecting patent rights than a nation ostensibly built on private property rights; a nation that has previously been the bastion of capitalism through the 19th and 20th centuries.

There are clearly many thousands of companies both large and small with far greater experience and in a far better position to advise Congress on the issue of patent reform. So why Mapbox? As is so frequently the case whenever business and politics intersect, follow the money! We have done just that and we’ve found that a no-name, no-experience company like Mapbox, without any patent applications and no patent litigation experience became thrust into the public debate over patents because all the money people behind Mapbox are card carrying members of the anti-patent efficient infringer lobby.