Posts Tagged: "USPTO Director Andrei Iancu"

While steps taken under former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu to restore equilibrium at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) have improved a bad situation to some extent, in many ways the damage has been done, said IPWatchdog founder and CEO Gene Quinn during a keynote interview with Iancu earlier today, on day one of the PTAB Masters ™ 2021: Winning at the PTAB Series. “It felt sometimes like the PTAB was making it up as they went along,” said Quinn to Iancu. “It eroded the confidence of patent owners. I do think it’s getting to be more of an equilibrium, but it’s a damaged brand.”

Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) hosted its first National Council for Expanding American Innovation (NCEAI) Innovation Chat virtually, featuring a discussion between USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and the Deputy Director General for Patents and Technology Sector, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Lisa Jorgensen. A key takeaway was specificity – Iancu and Jorgenson consistently advocated for the NCEAI to be specific in its identification of needs, to strategize specific solutions to those needs, and provide tangible measurements of each solution’s application.

What intellectual property (IP) rights achieve, and for whom, is a mystery to most people, including heads of state. President-elect Biden’s ambitious plan to support all of America’s workers through R&D investment, inclusion and by combatting IP theft from China, ‘Made in All of America,’ is well-timed. But it is unlikely to have the desired impact without the backing of reliable IP rights. Biden’s initiatives will require capital and non-contentious licensing to succeed. Good intentions aside, without support from a fully functioning IP system, do not expect America’s workers to be in a position to cash in on research and startups or to challenge China’s stated goal to dominate in areas of innovation and technology by 2025.  

“Qualified women are unnecessarily excluded from membership in the patent bar,” wrote Mary T. Hannon in a recent law review article seen by Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who promptly sent a letter to United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu demanding answers. A scandal of epic proportions in 2020 if an agency of the executive branch is actively excluding women from the ranks of patent practitioners. But it’s just not true.

Since U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu took office, I have observed, with admiration, how he has taken bold action to improve perceived problems in the patent system. The Director’s bold action has also caught the attention of members of the Supreme Court. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, observed, “[n]or has the Director proven bashful about asserting these statutory powers to secure the [policy judgments] he seeks.”
Oil States Energy v. Greene’s Energy Group, 138 S.Ct. 1365, 1381 (2018) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting).

I wonder, however, whether the law now permits Director Iancu to do something even bolder: create rules interpreting Section 101, at least within the limited context of the America Invents Act’s (AIA’s) post-grant review trials, such that courts may defer to the Director’s interpretation under Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984).

In his address to the Intellectual Property Owners Virtual Annual Meeting yesterday, USPTO Director Andrei Iancu said that, despite sharp declines in filings and renewals, COVID-19 seems to have spurred innovation in some areas. “Small and micro entity patent filings are at a historic high, with more than 112,000 filed during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2020,” Iancu said. In an August interview with IPWatchdog Founder and CEO Gene Quinn, Iancu discussed one of the COVID-19 relief programs the Office has instituted to support small inventors during the pandemic. A pilot that offers free prioritization of COVID-19 related patent applications has been working well, Iancu told Quinn, and is expressly geared to assisting smaller entities.

I recently had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Andrei Iancu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, via WebEx. The focus of our conversation was the COVID-19 pandemic: USPTO efforts to work with stakeholders, the role of intellectual property in finding cures and treatments, and general thoughts relating to what the Office is observing. Our conversation also veered into Bayh-Dole and the the letter just sent by three-dozen state Attorneys General asking the federal government to use march-in rights against Remdesivir.

Today, March 13, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property met to discuss “Oversight of the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” with USPTO Director Andrei Iancu as the sole witness. IPWatchdog will report the details of that hearing in full, but in the meantime it is worth reviewing what the Subcommittee covered in its first hearing, held February 26, which included the report of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) on the findings of the IPEC’s Annual Intellectual Property Report. While the hearing was nominally about the IPEC report, comments made and questions raised by Subcommittee members throughout the course of the hearing made it clear that the Subcommittee intends to play an important role in the debate around IP and patent law during the 116th Congress.

On February 7, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) released the latest version of its International IP Index assessing the intellectual property environments in 50 world economies. Once again, the United States achieved the top overall ranking as the strongest intellectual property regime in the world. The country’s improved ranking in patent rights—moving from its twelfth-place ranking in 2018 to a tie for second place this year—is particularly notable. However, the United States does find itself tied with 10 other countries for that second-place ranking in patent rights and is just as close to being tied with thirteenth-place Italy as it is to being tied with first-place Singapore.