Author: Gene Quinn

History shows our patent system can recover, but current leaders lack vision In many parts of the world on April 26, there was reason to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day. In the United States, there should be less celebration and more reflection on how elected leaders, appointed officials and learned jurists are allowing the engine of U.S. economic dominance to be disassembled. However, there could be much to celebrate in America if a few decisions in the past 11 years are reversed to put the United States on exceptionally solid footing. Positive signs Though the U.S. patent system is...

Speculation grows in Supreme Court’s pending ruling on TC Heartland.  When Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently rolled out his innovation agenda for the 115th Congress during a special event at the United States Capitol, he said there is a good chance that patent litigation reform will happen this year. The chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force characterized patent litigation as a tremendously thorny issue: “I believe there’s one area where we can see real progress this year: venue. Abusive litigants have exploited a hole in the law to direct a disproportionate number of suits to plaintiff-friendly forums,...

Arbitrary rulings are the board’s trademark.  If doubt remained that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board is a thoroughly broken tribunal incapable of redemption or fixing, that doubt has to be erased after a recent ruling by the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s entity. The PTAB has a history of harassing Trading Technology International, which owns patents on various graphical user interfaces. These patents have been subject to repeated covered business method (CBM) challenges at the PTAB despite the fact that graphic user interfaces are not business methods, and they present a technological solution to a technological problem....