One of the common complaints about the U.S. patent system for the past couple of decades is that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been approving too many low quality patents, that are then used by patent holders to extort licensing fees or out-or-court settlements from alleged infringers. One way in which the America Invents Act, signed in September 2011, tried to respond to the complaint was to strengthen the post-approval re-examination process for patents. The article quoted below suggests that the strengthened process may be having the intended effect.
(p. B4) The Patent Trial and Appeal Board is a little known but powerful authority that often allows a company embroiled in a lawsuit to skip the question of whether it infringed a patent–and challenge whether the patent should have been issued in the first place.
The board was launched in September 2012 as part of the massive patent overhaul passed by Congress the previous year and is currently staffed by 181 judges, many of whom have deep experience in intellectual property or technical fields like chemical and electrical engineering. Through last Thursday it had received 1,056 requests to challenge patents, far more than were received by any federal court over the same time period.
The board is part of the Patent and Trademark Office. But so far, it hasn’t shied away from upending the office’s decisions to issue certain patents. As of last week, the board had issued 25 written decisions concerning patent challenges, and upheld parts of challenged patents in only a few of them.
. . .
In recent months, Randall Rader, the chief judge of the Federal Circuit, has been one of the board’s most outspoken critics. At a conference of intellectual-property lawyers last fall, the judge called the board’s panels “death squads…killing property rights.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rader said the board is too quick to toss out patents that demonstrate only modest innovation. “The board needs to incentivize human progress–and understand that it often happens one small step at a time,” he said.
But many company lawyers think the board is doing exactly as it should–taking a skeptical look at patents that have added little to the world.
For the full story, see:
ASHBY JONES. “New Weapon in Intellectual Property Wars; Panel Can Upend Patent Decisions, but Some Say It Goes Too Far; ‘Like Getting CAT-Scanned, MRI-ed, and X-Rayed’.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 11, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis inside paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 10, 2014, and has the title “A New Weapon in Corporate Patent Wars; Patent Trial and Appeal Board Can Upend PTO Decisions, but Some Say It Goes Too Far.”)