12.10.17
Next Director of the USPTO Parrots Talking Points of Patent Extremists and Their Lobbyists
Summary: The next USPTO boss (still subject to official confirmation) may be little more than a power grab by the litigation and patenting ‘industry’, which prioritises not science and technology but its own bottom line
TOWARDS the end of the week Patently-O wrote about Iancu’s nomination hearing. Based on recent reports, it seems almost inevitable that he will be the next boss of the USPTO, which basically means that the “swamp” (patent ‘industry’) is taking over the public office which governs it. Priorities, as summarised by Patently-O:
IPR System: The system needs to be balanced and returned to a higher level of predictability; one mechanism is to have the Director involved in decisions by the Board.
Eligibility: Supreme Court jurisprudence is the “current law of the land” but has produced a level of uncertainty.
That “uncertainty” talking point is nonsense which comes from the patent microcosm. There’s also that other word, “predictability,” which wrongly assumes that the process is purely deterministic.
These sorts of talking points often come from platforms such as Watchtroll and IAM, which in its latest issue wrote that “US law firms featuring in the annual Ocean Tomo/IAM rankings, which identify who prosecutes the highest quality patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, have had to rethink many of their approaches in the wake of recent changes to the US patent landscape…”
“That “uncertainty” talking point is nonsense which comes from the patent microcosm.”For one thing, they must learn to accept that software patents are a thing of the past, but they don’t want to cope with such ‘inconvenient’ (to them) reality. In our next post we’ll say more about how the patent microcosm presses on with software patents agenda. It’s disturbing at times, but the important thing is that we’re seeing and responding to that.
“For US lawyers,” said another new headline from IAM, “the patent party is most definitely over,” which is certainly good. They just damaged the industry (the real industry) and finally, as well as belatedly, development can receive greater investment than patenting and litigation. To quote IAM:
Patent litigation in the United States has been transformed over the last decade, but as new data shows the average cost of a case falling precipitously, patent lawyers are facing up to a very different reality
Later today we shall write about patent trolls in the United States. Their party too is gradually ending, sometimes relocating to somewhere like China instead. █
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