This Saturday, September 15, 2017, marks the five-year anniversary of the first filing of an inter partes review. We’ve seen nearly 7,000 post-grant reviews filed since then, a Supreme Court…
Read more →Patent examiners have an extremely hard job. They’re given a patent application—which could be anywhere from a page long up to hundreds of pages, with patent claims ranging from a…
Read more →The Chamber of Commerce produces a yearly ranking of intellectual property systems around the world. This year, they dropped the U.S. patent system to 12th. If I thought their rankings…
Read more →The cost of bad patents is not just the cost of lawsuits. This may seem obvious, but apparently it isn’t. I’ve recently noticed a trend from the anti-reform lobby:…
Read more →Patent litigation costs have dropped significantly over the past few years, after a steady series of increases over the previous decade. This drop has sometimes been attributed to the use of inter partes review and to the Alice decision.
The chart below, created based on data from the AIPLA Report of the Economic Survey, shows that this appears to be a reasonable explanation of what has happened.
I was recently alerted1 to an entry in John Q. Adams’ diary, pertaining to patents in the early days of the United States. The entry, from Dec. 27, 1804, reads: “Next I called at Dr. [William] Thornton’s Office, acting under the Secretary of State as Commissioner of Patents; to speak with him regarding the application…
One of the biggest problems in patent examination is actually finding prior art. When it comes to patents and patent applications, that’s relatively easy—examiners have access to databases of all patents and applications, and they’re well-trained in searching those databases. But when it comes to non-patent prior art—product manuals, journal articles, standards proposals, and other…
Over a year ago, I took a look at a study of the success rate for inter partes reviews (IPRs) of pharmaceutical patents. That study showed that drug and biologic patents are significantly more likely to be upheld at the PTAB than the average patent. Recently, there’s been a wave of additional studies looking at…
Over a year ago, I filed comments at the International Trade Commission (ITC). Those comments explained why it went against the public interest to exclude Qualcomm’s competitors products from the U.S. market based on Qualcomm’s patent infringement allegations. Last week, the ITC administrative law judge in charge of the case agreed. What’s At Stake? About…
