Recent Headlines in the IP World:
- Blake Brittain: Search For New Patent Hub Begins After Court Ends Waco’s Hold On U.S. Cases (Source: Reuters)
- Foo Yun Chee: Illumina Offers Patent Licenses To Rivals, Patent Truce With BGI – Sources (Source: Financial Post)
- Malcolm Owen: Ex-Apple Inventor Describes How His VR Patent Works to Solve Car Motion Sickness (Source: Apple Insider)
- Blake Brittain: Google Sues Sonos Over New Voice-Assistant Technology (Source: Reuters)
- Kevin Dunleavy: To Lower Prices, Senate Leaders, FDA Chief Urge U.S. Patent Officials To Rethink Intellectual Property On Drugs (Source: Fierce Pharma)
- Donald S. Chisum: Fifty Years of Patent Law: The Top Ten Developments (Source: Chisum Patent Academy)
Commentary and Journal Articles:
- Prof. Greg Reilly: Patent Office Power & Discretionary Denials (Source: SSRN)
- Prof. Lidiya Mishchenko: Thank You for Not Publishing (Unexamined Patent Applications) (Source: SSRN)
- Prof. Brook K. Baker: TRIPS-Compliant Alternatives for Overcoming Intellectual Property Barriers to COVID-19 Countermeasures (Source: SSRN)
New Job Postings on Patently-O:
Here’s another link to the LAW360 DOCX op-ed
link to linkedin.com
Here is a link-
link to law360.com
Donald S. Chisum
Chisum is about a million times better than listening to Lemley’s propaganda.
The Baker article seems more evidence to me that TRIPS was/is a bad idea. How often do your clients file in (e.g.) Pakistan, or Costa Rica, or Egypt? Once every decade? Every two decades? Never? Even jurisdictions like South Africa and Malaysia are only a tiny part of your clients portfolios, correct? I estimate that <3% of the patent families that I have handled have had a Malaysian or South African national phase.
In other words, what is the real upside of TRIPS. TRIPS is there to make sure that our clients have access to IP rights in Costa Rica, Egypt, Pakistan, etc., but it turns out to be vanishingly rare that our clients actually want IP rights in any of those jurisdictions. Meanwhile, as the Baker article details, the existence of TRIPS—and, more importantly, the fact that TRIPS is a necessary pre-condition to WTO membership—creates all sorts of complications when those small jurisdictions want to take action for public health inside their own borders. We create a ton of headaches for the working out of their own, purely internal affairs, and in return the payoff is that our clients obtain an option that—to a first approximation—they never exercise at all.
TRIPS really should just be scrapped. If large market jurisdictions want to negotiate amongst themselves to create the same reciprocity that TRIPS presently guarantees, that would make fine sense. Why attach it to WTO membership, however, and thus drag hundreds of small market jurisdictions into its net, when their participation is so obviously irrelevant to any actual market realities?
“but it turns out to be vanishingly rare that our clients actually want IP rights in any of those jurisdictions.”
Bigots.
“In other words, what is the real upside of TRIPS. TRIPS is there to make sure that our clients have access to IP rights in Costa Rica, Egypt, Pakistan, etc., but it turns out to be vanishingly rare that our clients actually want IP rights in any of those jurisdictions. Meanwhile, as the Baker article details, the existence of TRIPS—and, more importantly, the fact that TRIPS is a necessary pre-condition to WTO membership—creates all sorts of complications when those small jurisdictions want to take action for public health inside their own borders. We create a ton of headaches for the working out of their own, purely internal affairs, and in return the payoff is that our clients obtain an option that—to a first approximation—they never exercise at all.”
All part of the oppression of the white man.
“Why attach it to WTO membership, however, and thus drag hundreds of small market jurisdictions into its net, when their participation is so obviously irrelevant to any actual market realities?”
Power and oppression derp.
New changes to come: Tallies for CPC symbols for examiners to be paused (no new CPC symbols for examiners for awhile, tho I’m sure some exceptions will apply here or there). Also, USPC old school classification will now be weighed into the decision as to whom to docket a case to (should increase familiarity of given examiners with cases). They’re going to change around the C star challenge stuff. And they will give spes docketing tools/ability (and I guess authority, as they used to have) again to modify docketing away from just using the algorithm only (I think is what they mean). Also they will create a “I don’t know where this case goes but it doesn’t seem to be mine” button for initial classifications (I guess this will kick it to a classification expert, not sure).
Peggy Focarrino coming back to the USPTO bros, gonna be a consultant to make the place a better place to work.
I see this morning that the EFF has blasted Sen. Tillis’ bill. I take that as a good sign. If the EFF were fully on board, then the bill would hardly be worth passing.
Hello all-
The patent community may be interested in my recent op-ed article published by Law360 about the USPTO’s announced plan to require applicants to e-file patent applications in the DOCX format. The DOCX conversion process will introduce technical errors, leading to uncertainty, inaccuracy, and inconsistency throughout the patent system. As an advisor for Petition.ai, I believe applicants will shoulder the burden, financially and otherwise, of filing petitions to correct the USPTO’s DOCX conversion errors. In addition, the article describes some of the IP community’s concerns about the DOCX proposal. I urge USPTO Director Vidal to apply a simple principle when considering forcing applicants to utilize the DOCX format — documents must not be altered — and suggest adopting the text based PDF form used by the federal courts in the Case Management/Electronic Case Files, or CM/ECF.
To read the full article, here’s a link.
Where’s the link?
“The DOCX conversion process will introduce technical errors”
Maybe you should consider drafting it in docx to begin with?
Also they’re not going to “require it”, at least not a first, they’re simply going to start charging a fee to do file in other format. This being obviously because the filer is just offboarding the conversion onto the PTO. But it might get formally required later on down the line once people become acclimatized.
“documents must not be altered”
Not sure how you think that she will enforce that. It either gets altered in the conversion or it doesn’t.
I commend to readers the Mishchenko Paper for its panache in declaring that the system of A-publishing patent applications 18 months after their priority filing date is misconceived and hugely costly, for the reason that it is responsible for unnecessarily increased levels of uncertainty amongst investors, with the very regrettable consequence that it damps and inhibits investment in new technology.
Is she really serious, that the consequence of delaying publication till later will be reduced levels of uncertainty for investors? The more submarine patents the better for investors? Is that it?
Or is her real interest in getting a Paper published that is more controversial than those of her colleagues in academia, one that gets more clicks, more downloads?
Certainly, “more clicks” is a thing.
But just as certain — leastwise in the US Academia sphere — is that deviation from “established groupthink” is a serious detriment to advancement in one’s Academic career.
Perhaps this was a “flip-off” then (in more than one way).
Meh – as it turns out, this hews towards the usual academic pablum, as it is more of an attack on wanna-be patent holders than anything else. Witness the second paragraph (emphasis added):
“Published patent applications are essentially an initial guess of what the applicant hopes will become the boundaries of his intangible private property and a speculative attempt at demonstrating its possession.”
Not worth delving any deeper.
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