Recently, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) proposed a concerning new rule. It would create serious due process problems, violate the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by changing an agency position without justification, increase the cost of inter partes review (IPR), and make it harder to invalidate bad patents in IPR.
Given all these problems, it shouldn’t be any surprise that most serious commenters—even from the life sciences industries—think the proposed rule is a bad idea. (CCIA, among others, filed comments explaining many of these flaws.)