This post has been cross-posted to DisCo. Last week, the FTC held the fourth in its set of hearings focusing on “Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.” The first day focused on a review of the current landscape of intellectual property and competition. The second day featured a variety of panels focusing on…
Tag Archive for patent reform
IPR And Alice Appear Responsible For Reduced Patent Litigation Costs
by Josh Landau • • 0 Comments
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…
USPTO Strategic Plan Focuses On Patent Owners, Ignores Public
by Josh Landau • • 0 Comments
Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) posted a draft of its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan. While many of the goals set out in the plan are important—for example, improving the ability of examiners to obtain the best prior art during examination and enhancing the information technology the USPTO makes available both internally and…
ITC Remedies Don’t Have To Be All-Or-Nothing
by Josh Landau • • 0 Comments
The International Trade Commission’s (ITC) basic function is to protect American industry against unfair foreign competition by prohibiting the importation of unfairly produced trade goods. That includes preventing the importation of goods that infringe a valid U.S. patent through what are called “exclusion orders.” But that function is limited by the second part of its…
Finding A Few Problems In New “Inventor Protection Act”
by Josh Landau •
There’s a bit of a glut of anti-innovation bills in Congress right now, ranging from the STRONGER Patents Act to Rep. Massie’s RALIA bill (which I hope to write about at a later date) and now, Rep. Rohrabacher’s H.R. 6557, the “Inventor Protection Act.”1 The bill begins with legislative findings. Unfortunately, the “findings” that…
Smartphones, Diapers, and Design Patents
by Josh Landau •
Apple v. Samsung is obviously about high tech smartphones. Other recent design patent cases have focused on high tech products as well—both the Nikola v. Tesla case Patent Progress covered recently and the Microsoft v. Corel case that Prof. Sarah Burstein described over on Patently-O deal with high tech products. But the basic issue with…
Did You Buy Your Car Just Because Of The Cup Holder?
by Josh Landau •
Opening arguments in Apple v. Samsung started this morning. While round six of the long-running case deals with smartphone patents, the potential impacts range much further. As I noted in my post yesterday, a rule of design patent damages that allows patentees to receive the total profits on the entire product even though the design…
PTAB Will Continue To Double-Check Its Work—All Of It
by Josh Landau •
Today, the Supreme Court issued two opinions in cases focused on the inter partes review (IPR) procedure. First, in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy Group, the Court upheld the constitutionality of IPR by a 7-2 vote. Second, in a more narrowly divided 5-4 decision in SAS v. Matal, the Court decided that the PTAB’s practice…
Like A Horror Movie Villain, The STRONGER Patents Act Returns
by Josh Landau •
Since the STRONGER Patents Act was introduced last year, it’s basically been a dead topic. Maybe that’s because the bill would gut the extremely successful inter partes review procedure and overturn more than a decade of Supreme Court precedent, crippling the ability of small and medium enterprises to develop products without fear. It would even make…
A New § 101 Trio Shows That We Don’t Need § 101 Legislation
by Josh Landau •
The Bilski, Alice, Mayo, and Myriad cases are sometimes referred to as a § 101 quartet because they set forth the Supreme Court’s test for patentable subject matter under § 101. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a new trio of § 101 cases emerge from Federal Circuit panels—Berkheimer, Aatrix, and Automated Tracking. The…