- James Cosgrove: The Most Likely Art Units For Alice Rejections
- Donald Zuhn: Endo Pharmaceuticals v. Actavis
- Art Gollwitzer: Texas Patent Law Landscape Is Changing
- Andrew Nusca: Should Apple Receive All Of Samsung’s Phone Profits Because Of A Patent?
- Michelle K. Lee: A Historic Moment For The USPTO And Innovators Everywhere
Get a Job doing Patent Law
Art: The act created a faster, cheaper process for reviewing patent validity. These procedures take only 18 months and cost less than 20 percent of the average patent suit. But the impact of these procedures is even more profound, as more than 75 percent of patent claims have been declared invalid. So now the concern is that the pendulum has swung too far via the cancellation of valid and valuable patents
Actually those canceled patents were junk and they should never have been granted. That’s whey they were canceled. I know: really subtle stuff.
before we enact new “reforms,” we need to asses these recent, significant changes
LOL. Like all the “assessment” that went on before the CAFC’s decision in State Street Bank? And all the “assessment” that went on before the CAFC decided that “algorithms” were “structures”? Right.
News flash: we’ve been “assessing” for about fifteen years. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the patent system was imploding and needs some major corrections.
unintended consequence
The consequences people are seeing are exactly the consequences that were intended. And guess what? More reforms are coming. And Texas won’t like them.
The problem lies in patents that should not have been issued in the first place being asserted in lawsuits seeking nuisance settlements
So let’s make it easier to invalidate those junky patents that should never have issued. Oh wait — we already did. And Art complained about it, in this same article!
it is fair to criticize the thousands of patents allowed by the Patent Office covering nothing more than methods of clicking on hyperlinks to online shopping carts or handling data without any technical details. The Patent Office has not handled the dot.com era well. But the Office appears to be learning from the Supreme Court’s guidance.
You could have fooled me, Art. I don’t see that the Office has learned much at all. I do see that it is able to hand off the job of evaluating patents after grant to citizens who can reason their way out of a paper bag. But internally the USPTO seems just as clueless as ever.
What comes to mind is the fear one has in the barber’s chair, when you want your hair to be the same length on each side of your head, and the barber makes so many attempts to get it right that, in the end, you have no hair at all.
Why? Because patent law is also a balance. A balance between the legitimate interests of i) those who own patents who need fast and effective enforcement, and ii) those who compete legitimately with them, ie with products that do not fall within the scope of any not-invalid claim.
The US Congress is that well-intentioned barber. No wonder folks like Art are leary of its having another go at the problem.
It certainly does not help when you have those from both the Left and from the Right pushing the head of the person having his haircut and saying “See, this side is longer, cut here.”
And please, do not be so polly anna as to think that such “influences” are absent.
Not only are they NOT absent, I would posit that they are the “loudest**” voices – even here in this “ecosystem.”
**loudest, as in the empty clattering wagon manner at that.
Art Gollwitzer says:
“And courageous defendants and judges can handle the bad patents already issued.”
Apparently he thinks that the defendants in patent trials on cases that blatantly never should have issued (generally in this context under 101) are “courageous”, and that’s his answer for this colossal legal screw up. Never mind that some of them cannot afford to be “courageous” since the cost of a simple trial is through the roof.
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