Source: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/mjlst/category/patents/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 21:14:55+00:00

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Since the beginning of the new year, China has implemented various new Intellectual Property (“IP”) changes. Three major changes are particularly critical for promoting an enhanced IP system in China.
The first change is the establishment of a new IP appellate court. On October 26, 2018, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee issued the Decision on Several Issues Concerning the Litigation Procedures in Patent and Other Intellectual Property Cases. On December 3, 2018, in a plenary session of the Judicial Committee of the Supreme Court chaired by Chief Justice Zhou Qiang, the Committee passed the Supreme Court Guidance Re Intellectual Property Tribunal. The official IP court was finally launched in January 2019. The new body is expected to hear appeals from both civil and administrative matters. According to Chief Justice Zhou Qiang, handing civil and administrative patent appeals to the new IP court will help unify adjudications related to patent validity and infringement, improve the efficiency and quality of court proceedings, and thus improve judicial protection of IP rights. The protection of IP rights has been a key issue of the trade war between the United States and China. China has been criticized for its lax IP protection for many years. The new IP court seems to come as a trade negotiation of the two countries.
Another change is China’s new policy on IP enforcement. On December 4, 2018, the National Development and Reform Commission, along with 37 government departments, released a Chinese interagency Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding. The goal of the Memorandum was to punish entities who seriously violate the patent law, including acts such as repeated patent infringement, non-compliance with the patent law, and serious illegal patent agency conduct. Like the new IP court, this policy seems to be another negotiation between the United States and China. Indeed, the policy was released days after the meeting of United States President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a summit in Argentina. The policy took a further step to enhance the IP protection in China.
The third change is the Fourth Amendment of the Chinese Patent Law. On December 5, 2018, the latest Draft of the Chinese Patent Law was presented to China’s State Council in a meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang. The new Amendment aimed to strengthen the protection of patent rights holder’s legitimate rights and interests, stimulate innovations, and promulgate legislations to effectively protect patent rights. Specifically, the Draft aimed to increase the penalties for IP infringement, to increase the amount of compensation and fines for willful infringement and counterfeiting patents, and thus increase the infringement cost in order to deter illegal acts. Particularly, the Draft proposed to raise the minimum fine to 100,000 RMB and the maximum fine to 5 million RMB. The Draft also stated that an infringer shall be cooperative in an infringement lawsuit. The Draft further set forth that network service providers shall bear joint liability for not stopping infringement in a timely manner. The Draft provided an incentive mechanism for employee inventors so that they could equitably share profits from inventions invented by the employees in the course of their employment.. Further, the Draft introduced a patent term extension system for innovative drugs, strengthened public information systems, and proposed to make basic patent data available in the China National Intellectual Property Administration (“CNIPA”) website. In order to foster patent dissemination and utilization, the Draft provided national and local authorities to increase public patent services and introduced an open patent license system. In addition, the Draft introduced a domestic priority of six months for design applications, extended patent term for design patents to fifteen years, and extended the time period for priority document submission for patents/utility models applications. The Draft Amendments were released for public comment from January 4, 2019 to February 3, 2019. The final rule is expected to come out soon this year.
It remains to be seen how these changes would improve China’s IP system. Nevertheless, the impact of these changes should not be underestimated. China is known as a big market for technology and business. However, foreign investors have been hesitate to invest in China due to China’s lax patent protection. With these changes aiming to establish an enhanced IP system, China is expected to build a friendly commercial environment to foreign inventors and investors, continue to improve domestic innovations, and encourage collaborations between foreign corporations with local companies. For instance, it has been said that these changes would attract global pharmaceuticals and tech companies to China because an enhanced IP system would enable foreign companies to uphold their IP in specialist courts, which is a great reassurance for foreign investors and inventors.
Artificial Intelligence as Inventors: Who or What Should Get the Patent?
Ever since the introduction of electronic computers, innovators across the world have focused on the development of artificial intelligence (“AI”), the goal being to enable machines to act like humans by making decisions and responding to situations. Generally considered to be the first artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist was designed in 1955 and enabled a machine to prove mathematical theorems. Since then, people have developed machines that have beat humans in some of the most strategic and intuitive games, such as Chess, Scrabble, Othello, Jeopardy, and Go.
As new innovations are developed, whether in AI or other areas of technology, patents are a common means for the inventors to protect their ideas. However, what happens when the AI technology advances to the point where the machines are making the innovations? Does the protection afforded to human inventions by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution apply to new AI inventions? While this capability is still to be developed, the questions of patentability and patent ownership have been brought up previously, and will potentially need to be addressed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) in the future.
An initial question is whether the invention can even be patented. There are a variety of terms in patent statutes that indicate that the inventor has to be a human in order to get a patent, including “whoever,” “person,” and “inventor.” Therefore, if the invention is developed by a non-human entity, the same patent protection may not be applicable. However, assuming the inventions are patentable, then the next question is who should have the ownership rights to the patent. Should the AI itself get the patent, or should it instead go to the owner of the machine, or maybe to the inventor/programmer of the AI program?
The main purpose of providing patents to inventors is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by allowing the inventors to exclusively benefit from their efforts; it is an incentive-based program. From the AI perspective, there would not be much benefit in providing the AI with the exclusive rights of a patent, assuming the AI does not desire the money, recognition, or any other benefit that might come with it. Its innovation is more likely to be due to the natural development of its programming over time, rather than the incentivization of any reward it might get. However, since this technology is still being developed, maybe AI will learn to act similar to humans when it comes to incentives, which would then mean that giving it a patent could induce more innovative efforts.
For owners, depending on how the owner uses and interacts with the AI, the ownership rights of a patent may or may not have its desired effect. If the owner has the desire to use the AI to potentially invent something and exposes it to unique environments or equipment, then perhaps they deserve the exclusive rights to the AI’s patent. However, if the AI just happens to invent something with no direction or intent of the owner, it would not make much sense to reward the owner for exerting no effort.
Lastly, the patent could also go to the initial programmers of the AI. This would also likely depend on whether or not enough effort was put into the development of the AI after its initial programming. When the owner puts in the effort, then the owner might get the patent over the programmer, but if the AI just happens to invent something regardless of what the owner does, then the programmer could have rights to the patent. Again, if programmers would benefit from the AI’s invention, that would incentivize the programmers to further enhance their programs.
Since these specific capabilities are mostly hypothetical at this point, it is impossible to predict exactly how the AI technology is going to advance, and actually work, in the future. However, the technology is definitely changing and getting closer to making AI innovation a reality, and patent law will have to adapt to however it unfolds.
The Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution provides for State Sovereign Immunity, stating: “The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.” Earlier this year, the Patent Trial and Appeals Board dismissed three Inter Partes Review proceedings against the University of Florida, based on their claim of State Sovereign Immunity. See Covidien LP v. University of Florida Research Foundation Inc., Case Nos. IPR 2016-01274; -01275, and -01276 (PTAB January 25, 2017).
IPRs are highly controversial. The United States Supreme Court recently granted cert. in Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC to determine “whether inter partes review, an adversarial process used by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to analyze the validity of existing patents, violates the Constitution by extinguishing private property rights through a non-Article III forum without a jury.” Until this issue is resolved, IPRs will continue to be by companies such as Allergan seeking to protect their patent rights. Over the past few years, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass made headlines as a “reverse troll,” by filing IPRs against pharmaceutical companies while simultaneously shorting their stocks. Bailey has stated that “the IPR process has been a thorn in our side…We get a call from reverse trolls on a regular basis. Now we have an alternative.” This move has been well regarded by many critical of IPRs, including an October 9, 2017 post on ipwatchdog.com titled “Native Americans Set to Save the Patent System.” In addition, the St. Regis Mohawk tribe has indicated that these types of arrangements can help the tribe generate much-needed capital for housing, education, healthcare and welfare, without requiring the tribe to give up any land or money.
However, this arrangement between Allergan and the St. Regis Mohawk tribe has attracted strong criticism from others. Mylan Pharmaceuticals, a party in the IPR proceedings challenging multiple Allergan patents on Restasis, has called this transfer a “sham” and made comparisons to racketeering cases with lending fraud. “Allergan Pulls a Fast One” on the Science Translational Medicine Blog states, “‘The validity of your patents is subject to review, unless you pay off some Indian tribe’ does not seem like a good way to run an intellectual property system,” this is a “slimy legal trick,” and “this deal smells.” He suggests that “legal loopholes” like this sully the whole pharmaceutical industry look bad and that this will force Congress to take action.
Invisible Cryptography: Should Quantum Communications be Subjected to Legal Restraint?
Sending secret messages across the world has traditionally required sending messages that risked interception or eavesdropping by unintended recipients. Letters sent on horseback, telegraphs sent over wires, and radio transmissions through the atmosphere were all theoretically capable of interception in transit between the sender and the receiver. This problem was particularly pronounced in World War II, when the Allies easily intercepted secret Axis transmissions and vice versa. To ensure secrecy the messages were consequently encoded, resulting in seemingly random jumbles of characters to unintended recipients.
Message encoding in World War II operated on two separate principles. For particularly sensitive messages, ‘one-time pads’ were created using (theoretically) random values as starting points. This technique for encryption, while essentially ‘unbreakable’ without access to a copy of the one-time pad, required both the sender and the recipient to hold identical copies of the pads. The second method used machines to transform plaintext messages into code. This second method, famously employed by Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine, substituted true randomness for a complicated but non-random algorithm that provided convenience and reliability. While Enigma proved a sufficient safeguard against traditional pen-and-paper codebreakers, early computers proved adept at quickly defeating the encryption, as dramatically highlighted in “The Imitation Game,” the recent film detailing Alan Turing’s invention of a codebreaking computer during World War II.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, cryptographic systems were added to the State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (“ITAR”) Munitions List shortly after World War II. Thus, while the U.S. government was severely limited in its ability to shield secret messages from foreign adversaries, it categorized the tools, methods, and development of cryptographic systems as munitions and severely regulated their export to foreign entities. While today the Department of State has narrowed the scope of cryptography to exclude civilian products, regulations remain on specialized military applications. A key assumption of this regulatory regime is that sensitive diplomatic and military information will be transmitted ‘in the clear’ for all who happen to have access to the channel of communications. While today many communications have moved from radio waves to fiberoptic cables, both systems remain vulnerable to surveillance over the air and online.
Last year however, China took a major step toward a vast departure in the philosophy of secret communication. With the launch of the Quess satellite, China hopes to enable quantum entanglement communication between two ground sites. The satellite would in principle transmit a photon to the ground, while retaining a photon that is ‘entangled’ with the released photon. Any changes to the photon on the satellite would thus be reflected in the photon on the ground, serving as a rudimentary method for transmitting binary information. This test comes on the heels of an experiment at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which demonstrated the transmission of information between two electrons separated by a distance of 17 kilometers.
A unique feature of this mode of transmission is that information is not propagated from the sender to the receiver via radio waves, which can be intercepted, but rather via the principle of quantum entanglement. Any attempt to eavesdrop would theoretically be perfectly detectable, as the act of observing the photons being transmitted would potentially change their state and render the communication either unreadable or otherwise obviously tampered with. A system could therefore be developed to automatically cut off communications if disturbances are detected.
Interestingly enough, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent that describes a similar method for transmitting information via quantum entanglement. The invention, claimed by Zhiliang Yuan and Andrew James Shields on behalf of Toshiba Corporation, was filed with the PTO on September 8, 2006 and published August 7, 2012. This patent builds on prior art that envisioned quantum cryptography, much of which was quietly filed with the PTO during the preceding two decades. Nevertheless, neither Congress nor the Department of State has acted to incorporate any reference to quantum communications into law, perhaps reflecting an unwillingness to address emerging technology that sounds like science fiction, as with self-driving cars and cyberspace before it.
Despite Congress’ history of lethargy in addressing new innovations and the State Department’s regulatory silence on the matter, legislative action or regulation may yet be premature. China has claimed its satellite has successfully sent a ‘hack-proof’ communication from its satellite, but the results have not been studied by the scientific community. Furthermore, no public demonstration has been made of a practical, non-laboratory quantum entanglement communication product. Even if the technology were to be brought to market, any early application will likely have severely low bandwidth by today’s standards, more closely resembling the telegraph than a gigabit internet connection. But with organizations around the world exploring ground- and space-based experiments with quantum communications, the technology appears poised to exit science fiction and enter practical application. Within the next generation, the codebreaking arms race may ultimately become obsolete, and Congress will be faced with a need to address the new secret communication regime.
The University of Minnesota owns a number of patents on cell phone signal processing technology that was invented by Professor Georgios Giannakis of U of M’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and his colleagues. The U of M claims that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Cellco Partnership (a joint venture between Verizon and Vodaphone, doing business as Verizon Wireless) are infringing five of these patents, and in 2014 it sued the companies in Minnesota federal district court for patent infringement. The U of M is “a great research university,” President Eric Kaler said, and “must vigorously protect our faculty, [their] discoveries and the overall interests of our university.” (The U collects about $40 million annually in royalties from licensing and the commercialization of faculty work.) Apparently, the cell phone carriers infringed the patents by utilizing Ericsson radio chips that code signals for wireless transmission and practicing patented methods the chips performed.
Ericsson, the wireless carriers’ equipment supplier, then acted to protect its defendant customers against the U by intervening in the Minnesota infringement suit. Ericsson then filed inter partes review (IPR) proceedings in the USPTO to invalidate the U of M patents on which the U was suing the carriers. An IPR is a new type of administrative proceeding that the recent America Invents Act established to provide a swifter and supposedly cheaper way for small companies to resist demands by trolls that they pay patent tribute. Instead of engaging in district court litigation, an aggrieved party can seek an IPR before the USPTO, which then employs its patent expertise to determine whether the patents it issued are invalid, and (if so) consequently relieving the aggrieved party from infringement liability (an invalid patent cannot be infringed).
Here is where the complications set in. The 11th Amendment preserves state sovereign immunity against suit—“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States . . . .” Thus, when a patent owner sued a Florida state agency that provided college tuition payment plans, for patent infringement, the Supreme Court held the law subjecting states to infringement liability unconstitutional under the 11th Amendment. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd. v. College Savings Bank, 527 U.S. 627 (1999). Accordingly, in two January 2017 IPR cases, the USPTO held that the 11th Amendment required it not to allow proceedings before it against Maryland and Florida. Neochord, Inc. v. Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore and Harpoon Medical, Inc., IPR2016-00208 (May 23, 2017), http://www.ptablitigationblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IPR2016-00208.pdf; Covidien LP v. University of Florida Research Found. Inc., IPR2016-01274 (Jan. 25, 2017), http://www.finnegan.com/files/upload/LES_Insights_Column/2017/CovidienvUFIPRNos20160126476.pdf. Although waiver was urged, the USPTO said it was inapplicable because the 11th Amendment is jurisdictional—it deprived the tribunal of any jurisdiction to act, so that jurisdiction could be considered at any time. Waiver requires an affirmative act of invoking federal jurisdiction in the relevant tribunal, and that had not occurred.
Ericsson argued, in support of its claim that there was jurisdiction to hear its IPR challenges, that the U had waived its 11th Amendment immunity by suing Ericsson’s customers in the Minnesota district court. Ericsson said that the U “has consented to jurisdiction,” when it sued Ericsson’s customers in the district court, because by filing lawsuits against Ericsson’s customers, “it could surely anticipate” that Ericsson would bring an IPR case at the USPTO to invalidate the patents asserted against its customers for using its products. The U has now urged the USPTO to dismiss Ericsson’s IPR cases, insisting that it has not waived its sovereign immunity by suing the phone carriers—not Ericsson, a third party to the U’s patent infringement suits.
The U argues that the law is clear that a waiver must be personal, i.e., filing a lawsuit or counterclaims in the same action and in the same forum. Thus, in Regents of Univ. of New Mexico v. Knight, 321 F.3d 1111, 1125 (Fed. Cir. 2003), the Federal Circuit held that it would be unfair to let New Mexico sue in federal court to enforce a right to ownership of patents arising from contracts “and, at the same time, to claim immunity from liability [in the same case] for royalties or other compensation arising from those same contracts and conduct.” The court added, “Moreover, because a state as plaintiff can surely anticipate that a defendant will have to file any compulsory counterclaims [in the same case] or be forever barred from doing so, it is not unreasonable to view the state as having consented to such counterclaims.” Id. at 1126. On the other hand, the Federal Circuit has held that “a state that files a [patent infringement] lawsuit in one district court does not waive its immunity in a related [invalidity declaratory judgment] lawsuit filed by a party in another district court.” Board of Regents of the Univ. of Wis. Sys. v. Phoenix Int’l Software, Inc., 653 F.3d 448, 462 (7th Cir. 2011) (citing Tegic Communications Corp. v. Board of Regents of the Univ. of Texas Sys., 458 F.3d 1335, 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2006)).
The U quoted the Federal Circuit opinion in Tegic that insisted that Tegic could not show that adjudication of its claim of invalidity was “not available in the Texas action,” and the U then argued, “Similarly, Ericsson cannot show that adjudication of invalidity counterclaims is not available in the Minnesota court,” where the U has (constructively) waived its immunity. There is a serious conflict here between the respective policies of the 11th Amendment that states should not be subjected to forums not of their choice and of the America Invents Act that a cheap, fast, expert determination of patent validity should be available in lieu of litigation in courts. Like the College Savings Bank case, this case may well end up in the Supreme Court. One important issue, not raised or resolved so far, is whether Congress may constitutionally impose, as a condition of the statutory right to acquire the benefit of a patent, and thus make as an integral element of the patent right, that the patent is subject to validity determination in IPR proceedings. Or would the 11th Amendment make that an unconstitutional condition on a benefit, as applied to a state, rather than a legitimate part of the statutory definition of a patent right?
An area of developing healthcare garnering attention in both the medical community and areas of intellectual property law is that of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine changes the old one-size-fit-all approach of medication dosing to instead tailor medications to each individual patient based upon their genetic make-up. This practice promises numerous benefits for patient healthcare, but also has some substantial road blocks to overcome before becoming a reality. Among the issues facing this field of medicine is the controversy surrounding the patentability of personalized medicine methods. Several recent cases such as Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. have raised serious concerns over whether or not personalized medicine methods are based on patentable subject matter.
This concern was taken one step further in the recent article Decline of Dosage Regimen Patents in Light of Emerging Next-Generation DNA Sequencing Technology and Possible Strategic Responses, which discussed the potential impact this may have on the pharmaceutical industry. Among the concerns addressed was the impact of not being able to obtain patents on dosing regimens for drugs developed by pharmaceutical companies. While a pharmaceutical company should have no problem patenting a novel medication it has developed, adding additional patent protection to its patent portfolio surrounding that product, such as patents on dosing regimens, has long been a practice utilized to keep competitors at bay. Considering the massive investment in research and development required to bring a new drug to market (sometimes billions of dollars), pharmaceutical companies are rightly alarmed by any potential loss of patent protection they may experience on their product. As the article mentioned, this issue will also surely be compounded by the transition to personalized medicine and integrated healthcare, but it may also be a self-solving problem.
Though the article is concerned with the impact personalized medicine may have on pharmaceutical companies if they no longer can obtain patent protection on dosing regimens, researchers developing personalized medicine methods currently face the same issues. In order for personalized medicine to have an impact on pharmaceutical companies, it must be a fully developed method that has been integrated into everyday healthcare practices. For that to happen, researchers must have a fundamental understanding of what specific genes give rise to differences in patients’ responses to medication. This has proven to be a long and expensive process requiring the systematic sequencing of millions of genes from numerous subpopulations of patients; and all of this work is expensive. Given that the end result of personalized medicine research is a method of administering medication based on an individual’s genetic make-up, patents on personalized medicine fall victim to the same issue facing pharmaceutical companies’ dosing regimen patents.
Lacking the ability to obtain patent protection on personalized medicine methods, the economic feasibility of research in this area becomes more questionable. To circumvent this dilemma, those within the field of personalized medicine will most certainly be looking for the same solutions as pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, one of two results will likely occur, both of which may solve the issues of dosing regimen patentability facing the pharmaceutical companies. One possibility is that the field of personalized medicine will be unable to economically sustain future research without patent protection and fully integrated healthcare will never become a reality; making this issue disappear for pharmaceutical companies. The other, more likely, possibility is that in order for research in the field of personalized medicine to continue, those researchers will solve the very dilemma that pharmaceutical companies fear will be brought about by the emergence of integrated healthcare. Either way, pharmaceutical companies’ dosing regimen patents are so closely tied to the fate of personalized medicine patents that the emergence of integrated healthcare most likely cannot occur in a manner that will be detrimental to pharmaceutical companies’ patent portfolio.
The Broad Institute and the University of California will argue claims related to ownership on Patents relating to CRISPR (clustered regular interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing technologies. The arguments will be heard on Dec, 6 by the Patent Trial and Appeals Board.
CRISPR technology utilizes prokaryotic DNA segments to confer immunity to foreign genetic elements. CRISPR editing technology has the potential to alter human DNA sequences by removing existing genes or inserting new ones. Moving forward, CRISPR technology has the potential to develop into a form of gene therapy, whereby the human genome can be edited to fortify one’s immune system against infectious diseases or other hereditary issues. CRISPR technology raises ethical concerns, especially relating to the potential use in altering the genes of human embryos.
Although CRISPR technology has been understood for over a decade, the current case revolves around an improvement using cas9 protein that splices DNA at a specific locus. The Broad Institute asserts that patents filed on behalf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University Researchers (Broad Institute being the eventual assignee of the patents) maintain priority over those owned by University of California. However, the relevant patents have been asserted pre-AIA. Therefore, priority date will be established by date of the invention rather than under the AIA standard of application date. The Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) initially maintained that the date of invention was properly asserted prior to the patents upon which the challenge was brought. If the decision of the PTAB is upheld, the University of California patents will invalidate the patents held by MIT and Harvard. It’s important to note that both parties are asserting priority date to a previous University of California patent relating to CRISPR technology. The PTAB may determine that both parties failed to prove priority date ahead of the US Patent Application No. 13/842,859, thus invalidating both parties claims.
The Broad Institute is a research institute associated with MIT and Harvard University. It’s unclear how the decision will affect CRISPR technology moving forward. CRISPR technology has attracted lucrative investments from government agencies and private entities alike. Additionally, since the initial patenting of CRISPR, University of California has licensed out the use of CRISPR technology to numerous firms interested in its applications.
Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice for the Supreme Court remarked that in this age of science, we must build legal foundations that are sound in science as well as in law, because a judge is not a scientist and a courtroom is not a scientific laboratory. Further, our decisions should reflect a proper scientific and technical understanding so that the law can respond to the needs of the public.
Human regenerative healing from embryonic stem cell research has sparked many debates on the public’s needs. On one hand, this research has the ability to relieve great suffering and even death, but on the other hand, it is accompanied by the using and destroying of human life. Moral controversy is a dark cloud looming over any courthouse looking to rule on the science of regenerative healing.
Legislative measures have ebbed and flowed with presidencies. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have used executive orders to either expand or reduce federal funding of regenerative healing. President-Elect Trump’s policy is unknown. According to an NPR article issued in November 2016, “his campaign said little about research and development in general, or health research in particular.” This will be an important point in the near future as a Swedish scientist broke taboo in September of this year by altering healthy human embryos. Further, the NIH plans to lift the ban on regeneration in chimeras in early 2017. As it stands, the federal perspective towards future regenerative healing technology remains unclear.
Keeping up with science will continue to be a challenge. While it is against norms to destroy healthy embryos, there is a pressing need for the U.S. to compete in a global market. Hopefully, researchers, lawyers and politicians will eventually find a way to merge ethical, legal and federal funding policies related to stem cell research and regenerative healing into a solid legal foundation.
EmDrives: The End of Newtonian Physics?
The EmDrive has been the center of much controversy over the past decade, and rightfully so. But what exactly is an EmDrive, and why does it have the scientific community at odds with one another over the underlying science behind it? The EmDrive is a type of propulsion system that was first designed by Roger Shawyer in 2001. Essentially, it is a RF resonant cavity thruster that relies on electro magnetic radiation projected into the cavity of a cone to produce thrust.
The EmDrive was met with no small amount of criticism when first proposed because it is what is known as a propellantless propulsion system in that it consumes no fuel when producing thrust. Not only does it consume no fuel, however, it also appears to only produce force in one direction, thus contradicting Newton’s third law of “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Such a proposition has been compared to standing on the deck of a sailboat and pushing on the mast to propel it across a lake, or the old adage of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” The implications of such a device means that our understanding of physics as it relates to Newton’s third law (which has been relied upon for centuries) is either not entirely understood yet by humanity, or is completely wrong; which is largely why the EmDrive has received such criticism from the scientific community.
And yet, there are multiple confirmed reports of EmDrive testing resulting in this unexplainable thrust that have arisen independently from Roger Shawyer. Even NASA conducted testing on EmDrives in 2014 and reported measuring a thrust produced by the device. A similar experiment was then carried out by NASA again in 2015 to correct for some reported errors from the first test, but thrust was surprisingly recorded again despite the corrections. Also, an EmDrive paper has finally been accepted by peer review by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, granting the technology more authority from critics.
Interestingly enough, legal developments have also granted significant legitimacy to the EmDrive. Roger Shawyer currently has three patents granted on the EmDrive, while two more are still going through the patent process. Being granted three patents from the UK IP Office means that the physics behind the EmDrive has been thoroughly examined and was found to not violate the laws of physics, as such a violation would inevitably have lead to the patent applications being denied. Furthermore, Shawyer’s most recent patent, as of October 12th, was filed more than 18 months ago, allowing the patent office to disclose the information contained to the public. Such a public disclosure should in turn allow for greater scrutiny of Shawyer’s more recent efforts in developing the EmDrive.
The implications of the EmDrive being accepted as a legitimate technology are immense. First of all, a working propellantless propulsion system would allow for future space craft to be much lighter and cheaper without requiring large amounts of rocket fuel for each take off. It also would allow for much faster space travel, possibly allowing humans to reach the outer limits of our solar system in a matter of years and Mars within only a few months. Furthermore, outside its space propulsion systems applications, there’s really no limit to what it may be applied to.
Despite passing several hurdles in recent years, however, the EmDrive is still a long way from leading us to interstellar travel. The testing conducted by NASA, while showing positive results, also recorded thrust of a force just slightly higher than the magnitude of error for the experiment. Also, while this positive result allowed it to pass peer review, that does not necessarily mean that the technology is sound and will not later be found to have flaws. In all likelihood, the chances of a new technology being discovered that, for the first time, violates the laws of physics as we have known them for hundreds of years is a far less likely result than finding some sort of experimental error in the technology. But maybe, just maybe, this could be the end of Newtonian physics as we know it.
“Dovre: What’s the distinction between troll and man?
Peer: So far as I know, there is none, by my score.
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Act II, ll. 903–06 (John Northam, trans., 2007) (1876).
In recent events, internet “trolling” has become something of a hot issue. This discussion will not address internet trolling (even tangentially), but will instead endeavor to shed light upon a different, often craftier member of troll-kind: the patent troll.
To begin, what is a “patent troll?” The term has taken a somewhat expansive usage since its original appearance in a 1990’s educational video released to corporations. Today, the term can refer to a broad range of practices, but most commonly is understood as the practice of an individual or corporation (sometimes with a large patent portfolio) that abusively uses the threat of enforcement litigation for overly broad, and probably invalid, patents that it has acquired to essentially extort licensing agreements from companies (often quite small) that do not necessarily have the resources to devote to patent litigation, and are likely not even infringing on the “trolls” patented invention to begin with.
Company A sends a letter to Company B demanding that it licenses patent A3, or will face a “prompt” litigation action.
In this example, Company B, fearing that Company A may actually be within it’s legal rights, agrees to pay Company A the fee to license patent A3 for fear of Company A filing expensive patent litigation against Company B, even though a court would almost certainly find that invention ABC123 is nothing like patent A3, and therefore that Company B is not infringing on Company A’s rights (for a few “real world” examples, as well as a dash of technology industry gossip, see this article by Business Insider).
The question arising from situations like this that many courts and lawmakers have hemmed and hawed over is this: who is right? On the one hand, federal patent law strives to protect the rights of the legitimate inventor, and incentivize the very “progress of the useful arts”. On the other hand, how can the law protect companies and individuals like Company B from being bullied by the aggressive assertion of patent rights by companies like Company A?
The answers have manifested themselves mostly through federal and state law making, starting first with the enactment of the Lahey-Smith America Invents Act (the “AIA” for those in the know). This Act modified existing US patent law to allow for a process called “post-grant opposition,” which essentially allows individuals to challenge the validity of a patent after it has been issued by the USPTO, but without having to set foot in a courtroom (theoretically creating a much cheaper option than trial for individuals seeking to invalidate broad patents) (for more info on the process, see here).
The AIA is still relatively new (enacted in 2012), and it is hard to say for certain how this procedure has affected the act of “patent trolling”, however some have made the claim that the AIA has not had the effect of “starving patent trolls” that the lawmakers hoped it would (see here for more discussion on this point).
As such, individual states have taken the fore in this fight against the patent troll, and it is often the case that state consumer protection agencies make up the front lines, by way of various state unfair trade practice laws. However, many state legislatures have taken a much more targeted strategy, and have begun to arm their agencies with the ability to specifically bring actions against individuals and corporations for the “bad faith assertion of patent rights” (as of 2016, Minnesota became one such state).
This action gives state agencies a huge benefit in targeting “troll-like” behavior in the patent industry, but at what cost? Federal patent law preemption issues aside for right now (and yes, they are out there), how exactly will an agency define what “trolling” is? How will state agencies determine that the assertion of the patent right was “in bad faith?” Moreover, how will this effect an otherwise uniform protection that patent holders have across the US?
These questions, and many more, will no doubt need to be addressed by states adopting the “bad faith assertion of patent rights” statutes. For now, since I don’t have an answer off-hand to this incredibly intricate legal and policy question, I will simply eco the words of Henrik Ibsen: “what is the distinction between troll and man?” What is the distinction between patent troll, and legitimate inventor? And finally, are these definitions really something we want to leave in the hands of state agencies, which may or may not be relatively unsophisticated in the intricacies of federal patent law?
My initial impression is one of skepticism, but if the willingness of a great deal of state legislators to adopt such measures can be taken as some indication of a nationwide public demand for a new way to address these issues, maybe this is the start of a conversation that should have happened some time ago.

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 Application No. 13