09.08.18
Posted in America, Courtroom, Deception, Patents at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Watchtroll continues its court-bashing and judge-bashing tradition because it just cannot figure out any other way to stop the narrowing of US patent scope
Watchtroll is attacking the Federal Circuit (CAFC), i.e. judges, once again (it already attacked CAFC in the past, even quite recently, and it includes individual judges; it smears SCOTUS Justices and PTAB judges as well). Why? Simply because they’re not patent maximalists like Iancu and Watchtroll, who are apparently meeting already. Burman York (Bud) Mathis III published this piece a couple of days ago in a site that’s defending patent trolls, smearing politicians who care about technology, and habitually distorting the facts. As usual, we don’t wish to entertain/air the underlying arguments but merely highlight the fact that this is happening. They want to pressure judges by questioning their motivations etc. (perhaps to make it look like a scandal, as they did with Michelle Lee). And yes, it’s all about patent quality. To quote: “One might naturally expect that, if a rejection under § 101 appealed from the PTAB failed to address all the claim limitations and had zero supporting evidence to determine whether something was abstract or well-understood, routine and conventional, the case would be a slam-dunk at the Federal Circuit.”
“The USPTO isn’t a court and in order to maintain perceived value of patents it will have to follow the law and set its guidelines based on caselaw, not Iancu’s whims and ideology, which is like a religion attached to greed.”That’s a loaded statement and a rather gross distortion of what actually happens in appeals to CAFC (of which there are very many, resulting in affirmations almost all the time).
Some reasonable law firms realise that foul-mouthed patent lawyers who attack judges etc. spoil the reputation of the whole profession. They’re a risk to the system because they even upset judges, who are in turn likely to just turn their backs on patents altogether. When it comes to 35 U.S.C. § 101, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and SCOTUS must eventually converge, otherwise patents granted by the USPTO will lose their value (invalidated massively in courts below SCOTUS).
What also isn’t helpful is Watchtroll's endless obsession with Google, which yesterday it attempted to frame as a hypocrite. Lawrence H. Frank (also in Watchtroll) is now advocating yet more patents on nature. In its latest attack on 35 U.S.C. § 101 Watchtroll speaks of “[a] conflict [...] between the incentive to invent and the breadth of patent-eligible subject matter. It has become difficult to recognize the line between patentable subject matter and non-patentable products of nature. The Supreme Court [...] their rulings on 35 U.S.C. § 101…”
Alice and Mayo are a thorn on the side of patent maximalists because they set pretty clear limits on the scope of patenting. The USPTO isn’t a court and in order to maintain perceived value of patents it will have to follow the law and set its guidelines based on caselaw, not Iancu's whims and ideology, which is like a religion attached to greed. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Defendants (or accused parties) shouldn’t need to wait until there’s costly litigation to prove the invalidity of particular European Patents
Robert Jain. Image source: Unified Patents
Summary: The crowdsourcing or crowdfunding efforts which leverage PTAB to help eliminate bogus patents, wrongly granted by the USPTO, would be appreciated in Europe as well because of the out-of-control EPO
NOTHING matters more than patent quality. Granularity, complexity, novelty etc. all matter, otherwise monopolies are being granted on just about anything. Examples have been named here for almost 12 years and examiners from the EPO openly speak about these things, unlike their management. Examiners take pride in proper scrutiny of patent applications (like peer review of scholarly papers/literature), whereas management types just want to see big numbers, which they conflate with “production” (Iancu's approach as well as the attitude of Battistelli and António Campinos).
“This is where the public has to step in and correct the examination work, if not by opposition from a firm (typically prior to award/grant) then by crowdsourcing/crowdfunding efforts.”Sometimes, as in the EPO, examiners aren’t allowed to do their job properly. They get sacked or risk getting sacked if they do. We covered this before and there are leaks to that effect. This is where the public has to step in and correct the examination work, if not by opposition from a firm (typically prior to award/grant) then by crowdsourcing/crowdfunding efforts. Over the years there were several such efforts (like Peer-to-Patent), but none really endured in the long run because not enough people participated and these efforts predated AIA.
As Robert Jain explains and shows (a few days ago), Unified Patents' bounties work; they encourage people to submit prior art whereby patents wrongly granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) get invalidated at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) through inter partes reviews (IPRs). These typically leverage 35 U.S.C. § 101 (Alice at SCOTUS helps) and the Federal Circuit affirms, sealing the deal and nailing that patent’s (or patents’) coffin for good.
Here’s a new update from Jain:
On September 1, 2018, Unified added four new prior art contests to PATROLL, a prior art crowdsourcing solution. Three of the four patents (US Patent Nos. 9471287, 7594168 and 6546397) are owned by Express Mobile, Inc. (an NPE) and have been asserted against a wide variety of operating companies. Unified is offering a $1,000 cash prize for prior art on the ’287, ’168 or ’397 patents which relate generally to website developer tools.
Unified also added a $2,000 contest seeking prior art for US Patent No. 9119033, owned and asserted by PerDiemCo, LLC (an NPE). The ’033 patent, related to a vehicle tracking system, was previously challenged at the PTAB in IPR2017-01007 which settled after the Board instituted trial.
PTAB, based on a newer update from Jain, helps against a patent troll, Jay Walker, for the following reasons:
On September 6, 2018, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 8,549,310 owned and asserted by Certified Measurement, a subsidiary of Walker Innovation and well-known NPE. The ’310 patent, directed to a “method and apparatus for secure measurement certification,” has been asserted in multiple cases against such companies as Yokogawa America, ABB, and Alstom.
Even based on the title alone it’s not hard to see that it’s a bogus and likely abstract patent. The word “apparatus” is typical yet misleading. It would be nice for Europe to adopt an IPR-like process and for groups like Unified Patents to operate here. We’ve recently been highlighting some truly dodgy European Patents. █
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