AIA – 10 Year Anniversary

Sept 16, 2021 is the 10 year anniversary of enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011.  I’ve got a quick anonymous survey below (5 minutes) on the impact.

* My general policy on anonymous comments and anonymous survey responses is that I endeavor to avoid any disclosure of personally identifiable information to third parties absent court order (which has never happened).

Link to Survey: https://missouri.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0qSs6aKqNZSZj2S

Or complete the survey below:

31 thoughts on “AIA – 10 Year Anniversary

      1. 4.1.1

        Really Greg? With all the public patent auctions . . . plus all the public patent sales . . . plus all the comments and reports from trustworthy patent brokers which have occurred in the years since the AIA, this is a question only newly-minted patent atty would ask.

        1. 4.1.1.1

          Fair enough. I am a dolt of the first water. So, if I am to educate myself, where will I find the source for this statistic?

          1. 4.1.1.1.1

            My information is just dealing with people that sell patents and the actually sale of patents that I wrote to other corporations.

            1. 4.1.1.1.1.1

              So you r assertion is, by your own admission, totally anecdotal and unscientific? You will have to forgive those of us who do not choose to make public policy decisions on the basis of your unverified (and unverifiable) say-so.

              1. 4.1.1.1.1.1.1

                Uh no Greg. We have brokers of patents come to the law firm and give presentations.

                The estimates are from these brokers also.

                Also, I know they have had articles on ipwatchdog about this.

                So I am not going to play the game of hunting down some good cites for you. The status quo of understanding is and has been 80-90 reduction in value.

                Your position-I am not going to figure out what has happened to the value of patents and anyone that says anything must provide me with cites to back it up or I will claim anecdotal.

                1. That seems a little high bro, considering the number of filings do nothing but go up. If it was that high across the board then I doubt the filings wouldn’t have stayed a growin’. And I’d be laid off by now.

                2. 6, the filing are not going up for US inventions.

                  The filings are going up because China has been filing so many applications and because international corporations have been filing patent applications here for international inventions.

                3. “If it was that high across the board then I doubt the filings wouldn’t have stayed a growin’. And I’d be laid off by now.”

                  NightWriter is pretty sure that an examiner RIF is coming.

                  Any day now.

                  Though, as I am fair, I will note that there are some signs that the office may be settling into a lower number of examiners (check out the USPTO dashboard). A controlled decrease via attribition could mean that his prediction was wrong because it underestimated management’s ability to control a decline in, rather than being wrong about an underlying decline itself.

                  On the other hand, management may be hiring less examiners because they’re (1) giving examiners less time to examine, and (2) working towards a future where examiners don’t specialize in technology areas.

                  If we don’t get a director who’ll right the ship, I expect office work product quality to eventually reach new depths.

  1. 3

    The company one keeps — and whether or not one can be considered “anti-patent” may well have as an EASY litmus test, how one feels about the America Invents Act.

    1. 2.1

      What objective evidence can you cite that tends to show that the rate or quality of U.S. innovation has deteriorated since the AIA?

          1. 2.1.1.1.1

            Ugh. Really? I’m disappointed (perhaps due to the late hour?).

            For if patents (and therefore data about them) tell us nothing about innovation . . . what do they tell us?

            You can’t be saying there’s no correlation between patents and innovation, right?

            That one of the driving forces behind inventors and companies of all sizes working so hard and spending so much money — including on R&D — isn’t the desire to protect their innovations with patents.

            1. 2.1.1.1.1.1

              If the USPTO sent every American a pre-printed, fill-in-the-blank patent this year, would that make 2021 America’s most innovative year ever? Was Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine (never patented) not a technological innovation?

              Patents are patents. Innovations are innovations. Patents are not innovations and innovations are not patents.

              1. 2.1.1.1.1.1.1

                To paraphrase…

                Number of new products are number of new products. Innovations are innovations. Number of new products are not innovations and innovations are not number of new products.

                Quality of journal articles published are quality of journal articles published. Innovations are innovations. Quality of journal articles published are not innovations and innovations are not quality of journal articles.

                Gee, that was easy (no data required).

      1. 2.1.3

        How would one show that Greg? What would we expect to see in the but-for world that “promotes progress in the useful arts” by “securing to inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries”? 1790 to 2006 we had a controlled experiment of USA v. ROW. Today there is not test group – all patents in the world are privileges for the wealthy elite (like pre-1790).

        How would one show the innovation that hasn’t and cannot occur without merit-based patents.

        1. 2.1.3.1

          How would one show that Greg?

          Number of new products coming to market each year? Quality of journal articles published by U.S. labs? There are any number of better proxies of innovation than are patents.

          1. 2.1.3.1.1

            What model do you propose to relate a tally of products and articles to innovation? I don’t see how this exercise would yield any credible evidence to support or deny the hypothesis.

            1. 2.1.3.1.1.1

              As Greg ‘demands’ of others, where is his data?

              Further, nothing he has provided indicates any degree of difference as to being ‘a proxy’ (and he employs a fallacy strawman of “patents ARE innovation” that can be directly turned around and be attached as a label to his preferred “proxies”).

        2. 2.1.3.2

          Probably the best evidence is the decline of the USA as the preeminent innovator in the world.

          China now beats the USA in some areas and other countries like Germany and the UK beat the USA in some areas.

          Notably all countries that beat the USA in some areas also promote strong patent systems.

  2. 1

    The AIA has been a net good overall, but less impactful than one might have expected. I put this down to the courts (CAFC and SCOTUS). At every branch point, the courts chose to give the statutory language a reading most consistent with past practice—even when the statutory language was clearly drafted to overturn past practice. This has frustrated achieving all the benefits that the statutory revisions were meant to achieve.

    1. 1.1

      Greg, “the AIA has been .. less impactful than one might have expected” is true in some subjects, but hard to reconcile in general with the the huge numbers of complaints about IPRs on this blog and its attempted use in defense in roughly 1/4 of patent suits. Also for the many U.S. applicants finding out that the prior art dates of almost all foreign-origin U.S. patents have been moved back in time to their priority-claimed foreign application filing dates.

      1. 1.1.1

        … hard to reconcile in general with the the huge numbers of complaints about IPRs on this blog…

        From the way they talk, I infer that most of those complaining have never personally been involved in an IPR. They do not speak with an air of familiarity. They just like to complain. The fact that the temperamentally whiny tend to whine tells us very little about the actual relevance of the AIA in the real world.

    2. 1.2

      Greg–this is ridiculous. “less impactful than one might have expected”????

      Patent value has dropped 80-90 percent since the enactment of the AIA.

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