Source: http://techrights.org/2018/06/24/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 12:30:23+00:00

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THE affairs at the EPO serve to show what happens when a patent extremist, Battistelli, is put in charge. With Iancu in charge of the USPTO (a Trump appointee) we might soon have a similar patent extremist calling all the shots (like Battistelli), but we’re not that pessimistic, at least not yet.
The magistrate judge recommended granting plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction prohibiting sales of the accused fire trucks and found that plaintiff established irreparable harm through lost sales of non-patented products.
Letting things burn (up in flames) because of patents? Does the court really want to restrict sales of fire trucks? There may be impending orders whose delivery is critical for people’s safety.
So a district court, the lowest possible court, is trying to deny access to the very highest court, SCOTUS? That makes no sense at all. SCOTUS would quite likely bring sanity back, as it has been doing over the past few years.
This basically means that frivulous litigation, initiated using bogus patents (issued in error), would still cost a lot of money to the innocent defendant (the victim). Well, isn’t that the “exceptional” thing? That justice makes the victim pay for the victimiser’s abuses/misuses?
THE US patent office (USPTO) is being pressured by the court system (notably the Federal Circuit, led by SCOTUS) to abandon patent maximalism. It’ll need to happen. If the Office does not change, people will lose confidence in US patents.
Where are all the supposed/so-called ‘journalists’ when one needs them? Like we keep saying, when it comes to patents, reporting is dominated by law firms and patent maximalism sites. So nobody seems capable of bringing up the fact that this bill is indirectly funded by pharmaceutical giants. They just ‘buy’ politicians to do their footwork; not just lobbyists but actual politicians.
PTAB is very important as it serves to protect the reputation of US patents by eliminating bad ones, often before they even reach a court or get granted. PTAB is viewed as “Evil” or “Satanic” only in the eyes of a meta-industry that profits from litigation alone.
PTAB isn’t supported only by small companies but large ones too. Even Apple, a serial patent aggressor.
Apple’s trying a different tactic in its battle with Qualcomm — asking for the chipmaker’s patents to be declared invalid.
The iPhone maker on Thursday filed petitions with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking for the four Qualcomm patents be canceled, according to Bloomberg. Those patents are at issue in a fight between the companies over licensing fees that Qualcomm receives for its mobile technology.
Apple argues the four patents — related to how to focus a digital camera, a device that works as a phone and personal digital assistant, touch-sensitive displays, and circuit memory — aren’t new ideas and shouldn’t be valid, Bloomberg said.
This should be considered good news as it also serves to protect Android OEMs. We generally support Apple’s side in this whole dispute for this reason.
Qualcomm patents are also being challenged at the EPO right now, as we noted last month and earlier this month. What will the final outcome be? Will there be a settlement? We certainly hope that the patents in question (EPs and US patents) will perish before such a settlement is reached (and if it’s reached). Qualcomm might be tempted to avoid invalidation at all costs!
The rest is behind a paywall, but the direction he’s going at suggests that he wants a slowdown (as do readers/subscribers of such a site, which caters for the patent microcosm).
Worry not; PTAB is only growing in relevance and Oil States assures that Iancu cannot eliminate PTAB. He can try to suppress it, sure, but at what cost?
THE decision known as TC Heartland has been great. This year-old, Earth-shattering SCOTUS decision helped discourage litigation which relied on Texas. It helped guard the innocent, i.e. those falsely accused of infringement, typically using dubious patents; they try to dodge the trolls-friendly courts, which blindly accept almost anything granted by the USPTO (usually in jury trials, where the jury is nontechnical).
“It’s no exaggeration to say the in East Texas the courts openly signaled that they would be plaintiffs- and trolls-friendly. They made no secret of the fact.”Baker Donelson (W Edward Ramage), in another paid placement at IAM, very belatedly caught up with In re Bigcommerce — a case about dodging to courts that do their job instead of trying to appeal to patent trolls. It’s no exaggeration to say the in East Texas the courts openly signaled that they would be plaintiffs- and trolls-friendly. They made no secret of the fact.
Over at Docket Navigator, a site which tracks cases of interest/importance, quite a few TC Heartland-related cases have been brought up over the past week. Consider Blue Rhino Global Sourcing, Inc. v Sky Billiards, Inc. d/b/a Best Choice Products and Adrian Rivera v Remington Designs, LLC d/b/a iCoffee, both of which are citing TC Heartland.
The ILO Tribunal: Is It Still Worthy of Our Trust?
We reproduce its content here in order to give our readers direct access to it.
The Administrative Tribunal (AT) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) is the successor of the League of Nations Administrative Tribunal, created as a judicial tribunal to ensure to officials the firm conviction of safety and security emanating from justice, provide a judge for internal disputes, and preclude the possibility of one of the parties being a judge in his own cause.
For European Patent Office (EPO) labour disputes, the ILO-AT is the only external legal instance.
The applicable law, under the ILO-AT Statute1, is formally limited to the terms of appointment and service conditions of the organisation concerned. But the ILO-AT’s case law on this point has been inconsistent; in some judgments, general principles of law and human rights have been considered as additional sources of law, in others they have been excluded2. The Tribunal does not order interim relief. Witnesses can give written statements but their cross-examination is not possible. Since 1989, the ILO-AT has declined to hold any oral hearings. The Tribunal has no means of enforcing judgments.
The Tribunal has recently changed its approach concerning general decisions. While Staff Committee members could, in the past, challenge general decisions directly, it now seems that general decisions (legislative decisions) may no longer be challengeable at all. Concerned employees must now wait until an administrative decision implementing a general decision, eg a career reform, produces a direct adverse effect on them,3 eg through a missed promotion that was due, visible on a payslip. This has as a consequence that every staff member must file an individual appeal instead of a staff committee member filing a model appeal for all. The number of internal appeals has thus since exploded.3 Another consequence is that many general decisions, eg decisions changing governance rules, may no longer be challengeable, even if they are presumably illegal.
Until 2014, the Article 7 “summary dismissal procedure” was only rarely used8: Sessions 1-116 (3305 judgments) saw only 19 summary dismissals (0.65%). The Tribunal changed its approach, leading to a rapid processing of a large number of complaints and a corresponding reduction in the size of the backlog. This was achieved without increasing the number of judges or Registry staff4. The report4 of the 332nd Session of the ILO Governing Body is a little ambiguous in its wording, but it gives the impression that it was the goal of the new approach to reduce the case backlog. Sessions 117-125 (676 judgments) saw a striking increase: 124 summary dismissals (15%), 74 of them concern EPO complaints (32%). Summary dismissal denies in fact access to justice.
It has been the subject of some debate whether the ILO-AT is truly independent.2 The Tribunal’s seven judges are appointed on three-year renewable contracts.2 Renewable contracts for judges cast doubt on their independence9. The appointment of the ILO-AT judges is not transparent and there are no clear standards for their minimum professional qualifications3. The Tribunal is financed through fees paid by the defendant organisations on a per-dispute basis10,11. About 60% of the ILO’s caseload comes from just six organisations, about 20% from the EPO alone.
The ILO-AT has had several bilateral talks with the EPO administration – a party in the dispute – without informing or inviting representatives of the appellants8. A March 2016 ILO report12 mentions that two video conferences were held in 2015, “with senior officials from the legal and human resources services” of the EPO, who “highlighted the internal challenges faced by the EPO in a context of ongoing reforms, called for improvements in the Tribunal’s case management in general, and appealed to the understanding of the Tribunal offering financial support if needed.” Written requests13 to involve staff representatives in these talks have apparently been to no avail8. Considering “the functioning and credibility of the Tribunal … at risk”, the ILO’s Director-General arranged a meeting with the EPO President12. To this meeting, which took place in April 2016, he (apparently) also invited the President of the Administrative Tribunal14. But when the Tribunal‘s credibility is at risk, does it help to organise bi-lateral talks with one party to a dispute – while excluding the other party?
The EPO administration informed the Director-General about its “targeted communication campaigns on the Tribunal’s case law, as statistics show that a considerable number of complaints against the EPO are dismissed.”12,15 This measure was positively received at the ILO since it was expected to help reducing the number of complaints filed by EPO staff12. But how can a Tribunal, whose task is to establish justice in labour disputes, welcome measures aiming at discouraging staff members from claiming their rights?
A March 2017 ILO report14 lays out that in its March 2016 Resolution16, the Administrative Council had “noted that disciplinary sanctions against staff or trade union representatives were widely questioned in the public opinion”, and that during a meeting in April 2016, the Director-General, the EPO President and the President of the Tribunal had “exchanged views on the situation created by the high number of complaints against the EPO, the root causes of the backlog and possible solutions.” An agreement on certain points “prompted the Director-General’s optimism that real progress could be made in the coming months so as to alleviate the Tribunal’s workload …”.
For the Tribunal to work efficiently, the cases are prepared by the Registry: “The Registry is tasked with providing technical, factual and legal support to the judges, thus requiring its staff in effect to draft judgments.”2 In 2010, the Registry was staffed by the Registrar and a part-time secretary10. Its current staff also comprises a “small team of legal officers.”17The Tribunal has recently reformed the work of the Registry, so that it is now even “better focused on assisting the judges.”4 The seven judges themselves are generally not familiar with the defendant organisation’s own and very specific sets of rules since they “do no work for the Tribunal on a full-time basis, but usually sit only twice a year for three to four weeks each time,” and “some of them have extremely busy schedules as they are still serving in the supreme courts of their respective countries.”5 The judges will thus not study the full set of submissions but rather rely on the work done by the Registry. The preparatory work of the Registry has thus a significant impact on the decision which will be taken by the judges.
The ILO-AT has issued publications with contributions from members of its member organisations. For example, Laurent Germond, “Director Employment Law” at the EPO, and responsible for legal disputes of staff members with the European Patent Organisation, was invited to make a speech at a symposium18 to celebrate the Tribunal’s 90th anniversary in 2017. His speech can be found in a recent ILO publication19, edited by Mr Dražen Petrović, the Registrar of the Tribunal. Mr Petrović and Mr Germond have been personal friends for a long time20. It may not be a coincidence that Mr Petrović joined the ILO on 1 December 2013 while Mr Germond joined the EPO at the end of 2013. Under the circumstances, the Registrar could naturally have more understanding for the arguments of the defendant organisation than for those of the appellants.
The ILO-AT judges met again from 23 April to 18 May 2018 at the International Labour Office in Geneva. The judgments will be delivered in public on Tuesday, 26 June 2018 at 3 p.m. and published on the Tribunal’s website shortly thereafter.
Among the EPO cases judged are those of Elizabeth Hardon, Ion Brumme and Malika Weaver, at the time chair, vice-chair and treasurer respectively of the Munich branch of the EPO’s largest staff union SUEPO. They were collectively suspended (on the same day!). The SUEPO chair and vice-chair were then dismissed, and the treasurer down-graded by president Battistelli – officially for reasons that had nothing to do with their work as staff representatives.
11 The costs per case, which vary roughly between 15.000 Euros and 25.000 Euros, are calculated by dividing the “session costs”, which cover expenses for the judges, legal services and translations, by the number of cases dealt with during the session. The major share of the Tribunal’s “overhead costs”, which include the office space and the operational costs of the Registry including staff salaries, have, at least until 2010, been borne by the ILO.
15 The glowing reports on ILO-AT sessions by VP5 or the Director Employment Law, which are published in the EPO intranet and in the Gazette, form presumably part of these “targeted campaigns”. You can find an example here.
It is not too shocking that the Trump-connected USPTO Director (Iancu) is quick to selectively embrace decisions that broaden patent scope, serving the industry he came from. He doesn’t seem to be learning the lessons about the importance of patent quality. It’s like he’s working for the patent microcosm rather than for applicants, or more broadly for science and technology.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Emmanuelle Charpentier’s company, ERS Genomics, the first ever US patent covering CRISPR gene editing.
The patent covers the use of an optimised guide RNA format in all environments, including human cells.
The USPTO deemed the patent to be unrelated to the ongoing dispute between Charpentier/UC/Vienna group and the Broad Institute/MIT/Harvard group.
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has confirmed that a request to obtain discovery for use in a foreign proceeding, in this case at the European Patent Office (EPO), will be denied unless the relevance of that discovery can be shown.
Circuit Judge Juan Turruella delivered the precedential decision on Wednesday, June 20.
Genome editing company Intellia Therapeutics has an exclusive licence to proprietary CRISPR/Cas9 technology owned by Jennifer Doudna, a founding member of Intellia.
A team led by Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier had conducted research on bacteria that can carve up and target genetic material, which led to Doudna filing the provisional patent application in the US in May 2012. In June the same year, they published an article describing their findings.
In October 2012, members of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT submitted a manuscript on the same topic and, in December, filed a provisional patent application relating to genomic sequencing.
THE strength of patents, as noted in the previous post, is determined by the goodness or the legitimacy of patents (based on prior art, inventive merit etc.) and it’s something that the EPO departs from whereas the USPTO reluctantly adopts. It begrudgingly adapts to SCOTUS and the Federal Circuit, which deals with plenty of appeal from district courts and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
Whether it likes it or not, the USPTO will have to improve; already, as we showed early this year, PTAB helps examiners elevate the quality of patents it grants (many get rejected based on Alice). Thankfully, we have not grown tired of writing about patents. Even after 12 years! I’ve personally done that for about a decade and a half and seeing the progress made in the US and Europe it looks like advocacy does have an effect, albeit a very slow one.
“Whether it likes it or not, the USPTO will have to improve; already, as we showed early this year, PTAB helps examiners elevate the quality of patents it grants (many get rejected based on Alice).”Media coverage regarding patents is still quite appalling. It’s like the patent microcosm appointed itself “reporters” and is now writing the so-called ‘news’ about patents (more spam/ads that we’re keeping track of and taking stock of). When the media posts pure spam for patent law firms or ‘business’ (all new examples from the past week) we’re ever more convinced that sites like Techrights are necessary. There’s a reason why EPO scandals aren’t covered much by the media, certainly not in the US.
Scanning through the past week’s news feeds we see that software patents are still being granted by the Office (USPTO), e.g. this to Genpact (announced days ago). Here’s more on that one.
“In 2014, the Alice decision made it much harder to patent software in the USA, ” Cory Doctorow recalled a few days day in an article about something else.
There’s a lot more beyond the summary and it looks like it took much research to produce, citing the eminent Mark Lemley.
If the courts had faithfully applied the principles behind the Flook ruling over the last 40 years, there would be far fewer software patents on the books today. But that’s not how things turned out. By 2000, other US courts had dismantled meaningful limits on patenting software—a situation exemplified by Amazon’s infamous 1999 patent on the concept of shopping with one click. Software patents proliferated, and patent trolls became a serious problem.
But the pendulum eventually swung the other way. A landmark 2014 Supreme Court decision called CLS Bank v. Alice—which also marks its anniversary this week—set off an earthquake in the software patent world. In the first three years after Alice, the Federal Circuit Court, which hears all patent law appeals, rejected 92.3 percent of the patents challenged under the Alice precedent.
The shifting rules about software patentability reflect a long-running tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit loves software patents; the Supreme Court is more skeptical.
That fight continues today. While the Federal Circuit has invalidated many software patents in the four years since the Alice ruling, it also seems to be looking for legal theories that could justify more software patents. Only continued vigilance from the Supreme Court is likely to ensure things don’t get out of hand again.
The 40-year-old Flook ruling remains a key weapon in the Supreme Court’s arsenal. It’s the court’s strongest statement against patenting software. And, while software patent supporters aren’t happy about it, it’s still the law of the land.
Like Sherlock Holmes’ quiet dog, the significance of the Supreme Court’s patent eligibility jurisprudence following their decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l is that there hasn’t been any. The Court has shown a similar reticence towards wading into the uncertain waters created by the Federal Circuit regarding the safe harbor created by the Hatch-Waxman Act, codified at 35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(1). Last Monday was the most recent instance of the Court’s refusal to address how the lower courts have implemented these statutory provisions in denying certiorari in Cleveland Clinic Foundation v. True Health Diagnostics LLC and Classen Immunotherapies, Inc. v. Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Denying certiorari petitions cannot be used to interpret the Court’s views on whether the lower courts are properly applying its precedent; the Court frequently permits an issue to “percolate” through the courts and then chooses a case that, in their view provides a suitable vehicle for further clarification of the law. The Court has recently used this practice in other contexts (Gill v. Whitford; Benisek v. Lamone). In the meantime, however, patentees and the public await the time when the Court will deign to weigh in on either of these questions.
The chief judge of the busiest patent court in the country made it clear this week that he’s still going to grant at least some Section 101 motions at the summary judgment stage. Chief Judge Leonard Stark of Delaware recalled patent claims against Amazon Cloud Services that he’d thrown out last year, so he could reconsider them under the Federal Circuit’s new Berkheimer framework.
He threw them out again. “Although plaintiff tries to rely on expert testimony, here this is insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact,” Stark wrote in Kaavo v. Amazon.com.
Kaavo is a software company that holds a patent that fairly bleeds ineligibility. The title is “Cloud computing lifecycle management for N-tier applications.” According to Stark, the patent is directed to the abstract idea of setting up and managing a cloud computing environment. Neither the claim language nor the specification discloses specific improved methods or systems of cloud computing, he added.
It’s not to hard too understand why they try so desperately to keep Berkheimer in some headlines; a Delaware case, however, isn’t of much significant. Decisions often cite CAFC, not district courts and definitely not PTAB.
But don’t expect the lawyers to lie down and give up; some patent “Prosecution” and “Willfulness” so-called ‘webinars’ from the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) and Practising Law Institute (PLI), respectively, are coming up. Such agenda-pushing by IPO and PLI has been covered here for a very long time. They just try to push litigation agenda, urging more people to sue (initiating ‘business’ both at the plaintiff’s and defendant’s side).
Software patents are rarely original, so PTAB does a fine job eliminating those. It’s simply applying Section 101 — something which many examiners have been failing to do (especially prior to Alice when guidelines were different).
Here’s another new example; the Office needs to stop granting patents which courts would not honour; it’s self-harming. It merely reduces confidence in US patents.
We’ve also just noticed this kind of resurgence of “blockchain” as a surrogate for databases in software. Ropes & Gray LLP’s Leslie M. Spencer and Marta Belcher ride the blockchain hype wave in order to promote patents that are bunk and likely void. They did it twice [1, 2] in recent days and it’s part of a troublesome trend.
Walmart too is pursuing software patents disguised as "blockchain" and days ago an article was published about it. It was titled “Why Walmart filed a patent for blockchain, wearables and EHR data” (these patents are just software).
Blockchain patent wars may be looming, and companies are experimenting with preventive measures.
Startups and industry leaders, like IBM Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are winning patents for the technology that is fueling cryptocurrencies and being applied to traditional businesses. They are also increasingly coordinating to uncover solutions—from cross-licensing and pooling patents to patent pledges—that would help ward off patent trolls and infringement lawsuits that plagued past tech revolutions, like the semiconductor or mobile phone booms.
A surging number of blockchain experiments and related patent applications across various industries present ripe opportunities for patent assertion entities or trolls, as they’re often known, who could hamper innovation if not properly contained, patent attorneys say.
THE ARRIVAL of Alice four years ago meant that software patents, even those that had been granted by the USPTO prior to Alice, were on shaky ground. If used litigiously, courts would typically reject these and if the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) got ‘called in’ in the form of an inter partes review (IPR) or petition, then too it would happen. Appealing decisions to the Federal Circuit would have yielded a similar outcome. So here we are in 2018; the USPTO continues to grant some software patents, as we shall show in a moment (a later post), albeit some are disguised thinly using semantic tricks and buzzwords.

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