09.20.16
Gemini version available ♊︎For Abuse Like Plagiarism and Malpractice, the US Patent System is Still World Champion
When all that seemingly matters is money, not innovation and society’s wellbeing…
Summary: Low patent quality, abusive litigation (e.g. by patent trolls) and various other elements that globally discredit the USPTO are only symptoms of a wider problem, which is a greedy system motivated by neo-liberal values rather than professionalism and servitude
YESTERDAY we wrote about patent lawyers that had engaged in plagiarism during the preparation of documents like briefs. It put patent lawyers in a not-so-flattering light and today we have this article about an outcome that says plagiarism of this kind of definitely not Fair Use, which means that some patent lawyers, who insist on respect for patent law, do not respect copyright law. To quote:
We’ve talked about online electronics retailer Newegg quite a few times here on Techdirt, usually in the context of its noble fight against patent trolls. I, personally, have a lot of respect for Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer, Lee Cheng. So it surprised me a bit to see that Newegg is suing another lawyer for copyright infringement on one of its briefs. And, so far Newegg is winning, as the judge has ruled that using the brief is not fair use.
The details here do matter. The defendant, lawyer Ezra Sutton, had worked alongside Newegg in one of the many patent troll lawsuits. Sutton was representing another company sued in the same lawsuit as Newegg by a patent troll, Adjustacam. They had won the case against the troll, and both Newegg and the company Sutton represented, Sakar International, filed motions seeking attorneys’ fees.
It was Patently-O that earlier on wrote about this topic and it now has this new article about patent malpractice in which it’s said:
The malpractice claim arose out of an interference proceeding and has an interesting twist. The lawyer needed to claim priority to an earlier-filed Japanese patent application that had been domesticated through a PCT. The Japanese application and the PCT were in Japanese. Regulations required that a motion to claim benefit had to include English translations of the earlier applications in the claim. The lawyer filed a US translation of the (first-filed, obviously) Japanese application, but not the PCT.
The Board awarded the earlier Japanese filing date. Seed won.
The Federal Circuit reversed. It held that without the English translation of the PCT, the Board erred in awarding giving the application the filing date of the Japanese application, and, as a result, Seed lost the interference.
Hence the malpractice case.
This article speaks of a Japanese application, i.e. application from the new hotbed of patent trolling (we wrote about this earlier this month). It seems clear that some of the abusive elements which the USPTO became infamous for are now penetrating east Asia, not just Europe (because of Battistelli with the direction he chose for the EPO). China’s patent bubble, for example, is truly a problem — an observation that even a new survey seems to support.
We often write about the EPO and frequently complain about the decline of patent quality there, not just alleged fraud. Expect us to write a lot more about it in the days or weeks to come. The EPO is gradually becoming another USPTO (and it’s not a compliment). █
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