What did the tribe think (or smoke) when it hired this man?

Summary: Allergan and Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe see their sham deal (or "scam") going down in flames and Michael Shore (above) accomplishes nothing but creating another attack vector against the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), perhaps serving himself well at the expense of the tribe's status

THE Mohawk people may not be aware of this, but a lawyer who has nothing to do with their tribe (Michael Shore, who speaks at Koch events) has harmed their reputation greatly. This also makes the USPTO look bad, albeit the PTAB helps correct it at the moment.

Another Law Professor inadvertently defends a patent scam and gives ammunition to a bunch of patent extremists who hired a writer, Steve Brachmann, to do their bidding on NAFTA (yesterday) and also promote scams such as this (4 days ago). He wrote:

On Twitter, this decision was the focus of a 20-part post, which was published by Jacob S. Sherkow, an associate professor of law at New York Law School.

Watchtroll doesn't care what's legal. All it cares about is patent maximalism, i.e. the revenue of a bunch of litigious law firms. Thankfully, however, the Mohawk patent scam that Allergan paid the tribe to participate in is going down. It's going down fast. Not only did PTAB shoot it down over a week ago; Senate too is now introducing a bill to stop the scam in its tracks. As Josh Landau (CCIA) said 2 days ago:

Yesterday Senators Cotton, McCaskill, Toomey, Ernst, and Perdue introduced the Preserving Access to Cost Effective Drugs (PACED) Act, a bill which would help prevent sovereign immunity from being abused to prevent invalid patents from being struck down by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

As Patent Progress has previously described, sovereign immunity has been abused in exactly this way, most notably by Allergan’s sale of their evergreened dry eye patents to a Native American tribe. The PACED Act would bar this practice, eliminating sovereign immunity as a defense in inter partes review to the fullest extent permitted by the Constitution. It would also prevent tribal sovereign immunity from being used in declaratory judgment actions, where a company that expects to be accused of infringing files a suit to invalidate a patent.

McCaskill played a key role in this (credit/kudos to her) and she seems to have built Senatorial support. Among patent extremists to whom ends justify the means Michael Shore will be hailed as a pioneer/hero, but for the rest of us -- politicians included -- Shore will be seen as the mastermind of a foiled scam. ⬆