Posts
Further Evidence That Examiners Can Be Incentivized To Improve Patent Quality
Patent Progress has previously covered the research of Profs. Wasserman and Frakes regarding structural incentives at the USPTO that affect examiner behavior. A new paper in the AIPLA Quarterly Jour...
USPTO Strategic Plan Focuses On Patent Owners, Ignores Public
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...
NPE Resurrects Canceled Patent To Go After Restaurants
A few years ago, a company called MacroSolve stopped creating products and started creating patent litigation. Its tool was a patent that claimed to cover mobile questionnaires. But after several ...
ITC Remedies Don’t Have To Be All-Or-Nothing
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 i...
Qualcomm’s Settlement With Taiwanese FTC Ignores Broken Promises
Last week Qualcomm reached an agreement with the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission (TFTC), overturning the $778 million penalty the TFTC levied in October. Qualcomm promised to invest $700 million in ...
RALIA Would Take Us Back To The Patent Law Stone Age
At the end of June, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced the “Restoring America's Leadership in Innovation Act of 2018,” H.R. 6264 (RALIA). RALIA, rather than restoring American innovation, aims...
The Inventor Protection Act Would Actually Harm U.S. Innovation
Yesterday, I went through the serious defects in the findings Rep. Rohrabacher based his Inventor Protection Act on. Today, I’ll discuss the problems with the legal changes the bill seeks to make....
Finding A Few Problems In New “Inventor Protection Act”
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...
‘Freedom To Operate’ Isn’t Even Close To Free
There’s been an increasing usage of the term “efficient infringement” in the debate over patent reform. The basic idea is that large companies make an active choice to ignore patents and just ...