What were they thinking anyway?
Summary: After months of scandals and very negative publicity the so-called 'scam' that the Mohawk tribe participated in falls over, leaving all parties bruised and their reputation tarnished
THE Allergan/Mohawk scandal is well documented. It has been covered to death all over the Web (even corporate/mainstream media) and we wrote nearly 10 articles about it (here's one among many posts of ours). The USPTO should, in principle, be able to reassess patents it may have wrongly granted, but (mis)using tribal immunity Allergan is attempting to prevent that from happening. A crooked lawyer hired by the Mohawk tribe (speaking at events of Koch-run think tanks) seems to have taken the tribe 'for a ride' and for a few millions in payoff the tribe now suffers a reputation crisis. By extension, this makes tribal immunity seem like a tangent of misuse. What a disaster. What an injustice.
Right now the patent trolls are talking among themselves about the latest in the case, which is basically late Friday news and thus scarcely covered anywhere.
A
troll wrote: "BIG NEWS: PTAB rules against sovereign immunity defense in Allergan "Upon consideration of the record, and for the reasons discussed below, we determine the Tribe has not established that the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity should be applied to these proceedings.""
"Very good," I responded, but the "Mohawk [tribe] stained its name with this patent scam..."
Shortly thereafter his employer, the troll
Dominion Harbor,
wrote that "Sovereign Immunity dead on arrival at the PTAB: "...proceedings can continue even without the Tribe’s participation in view of Allergan’s retained ownership interests in the challenged patents. The Tribe’s Motion is therefore denied.""
Hours ago the trolls' apologists/proponents from Bristows
wrote about it in their 'pet' blog (
IP Kat). To quote:
On Friday, the PTAB ruled that the Tribe could not claim sovereign immunity to avoid the IPR. Although there was an interesting discussion on whether tribal immunity applied to IPRs, for the AmeriKat [Bristows] it was the finding that the deal structure meant that Allergan retained ownership interests such that the IPR could continue as Allergan being a "patent owner". Mylan et al argued that the IPR could continue because Allergan was the "true owner of the challenged patents".
There's probably going to be plenty of coverage about it later today (Monday). It's noteworthy that all coverage of this has thus far come from trolls and their advocates. Can they control the narrative?
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