Do inter partes review proceedings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) violate the U.S. Constitution by extinguishing private property rights through a non-Article III forum without a jury?
That’s the issue the U.S. Supreme Court will consider in Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC, et al., No. 16-712 (2017).
This spring Tabet DiVito & Rothstein submitted a brief on behalf of the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago (IPLAC) as amicus curiae, in support of a petition for writ of certiorari to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Synopsys, Inc. v. Mentor Graphics Corp., No. 16-1288 (2017).
Still more voices are attesting to the instability of patent policy in the U.S., noted Steve Brachman on IPWatchdog.com last week, reporting on the May 8 discussion, “The Impact of Uncertainty and Negative Attitudes Towards IP Rights on U.S. Business,” which was part of an International IP Commercialization Council (IIPCC)-sponsored event in Washington, DC.
Last month I requested amici to support a combined petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc at the Federal Circuit in Evolutionary Intelligence LLC v. Sprint Nextel Corp., et al., which Evolutionary Intelligence had filed on April 19, 2017.
On behalf of Evolutionary Intelligence, I am extremely pleased that both IP Lodge BVBA and U.S. Inventor, Inc. submitted briefs on May 3, 2017.
Once in a while, it’s fun to get creative about something you feel passionate about, and that’s how this “fairy tale” came to be. Over the course of the first three installments, the big and powerful B-Techs became frustrated when the New Innovators threatened their dominance, so they hatched a pernicious plan to bring down the pesky patentees.
You may already be following this “fairy tale”—an allegory that came to me during a Sunday morning at home. The first two installments introduced the big and powerful B-Techs, and their frustration when the New Innovators came on the scene to threaten their dominance. Now the fable continues, as the B-Techs strike back …
So, yes: I wrote “a fairy tale.” Well, sort of. As I noted in the “first installment” on Monday, a bunch of things came together all at once—including a Sunday morning when I had a little extra time. So I cued up this story of how the Behemoth Tech companies became big and powerful because of their imaginative use of chips. But as time passes, innovation can be hard to replicate.
“A fairy tale?” you ask. Well, yes. Because every once in a while, even though the work has piled up, you feel energized and spirited about something enough during breakfast on a Sunday morning that ideas just well up and the words spring onto the page. And if you have a couple of spritely, cheerful teenage daughters who occasionally read stories, narratives intersect and you just have a little fun with things. And that’s what happened here. So, a fairy tale … of a sort. And here goes.
In posts here on my blog on March 27 and April 3, I described how in Evolutionary Intelligence v. Sprint et al. the district court for the Northern District of California invalidated a valuable pair of what had been durable software patents—a decision that in February the Federal Circuit upheld.
Both courts erred in overlooking valid claims, although in the wake of the wacky Alice ruling, such a decision might not have been unexpected.
I have a hard time listening to Washington politicians these days. All I hear is obfuscation and finger-pointing. Nothing seems to get done. And while the finger-pointing seems worse than ever, the inability to get anything done is par for the course.
If neither Congress nor the President can provide results, how can we get this country back on track?
