Remembering the Public’s Interest in the Patent System – A Post-Grant Opposition Designed to Benefit the Public
Eric Williams The problems associated with the existence of bad patents and the need for an effective, inexpensive vehicle for challenging them are nothing new. Over the past twenty-five years, several laws were proposed and passed intending to remedy these ills. Most recently, Congress introduced a bill aimed at curbing the adverse effects of bad patents, and prominent policy organizations and commentators advocated for, inter alia, the adoption of a new post-grant opposition as an antidote to the poison of bad patents. While these recent developments are certainly promising, without due attention given to the “advancement or social benefit gained...
Repairing the Bayh-Dole Act: A Proposal for Restoring Non-Profit Access to University Science
Aaron Miller The United States government invests billions of dollars every year in scientific research. Government agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA and the Pentagon directly employ legions of scientists and engineers. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds a tremendous amount of biomedical research. Besides running its own labs, the NIH gives generous grants to hundreds of universities and medical schools, and to the thousands of research professors who fill them. The federal government today provides about 60% of the total research funding for America’s many prestigious research universities. In addition, the government pays private, for-profit contractors...
The Disruption of the U.S. Constitutional Symmetry of Intellectual Property to Gain Conformity with an International Property Framework: A Road to a Global Market or a Tripping Point to the Gradual Collapse of the U.S. Economy?
John C. Hughs In a spectrum of governments that range from totalitarian (dictator or communism) to tribal (without any central government), there is a unique form that provides a symmetrical balance between the government and the independent inventor; this symmetrical balance produces technological advancement. Once this symmetrical balance is discovered, it allows independent inventors to have secure and unchangeable protection from the federal government that facilitates the courage and mentality to take risks of time, effort and wealth. The willingness of free inventors to take a chance on the free market without government intervention but with inventor controlled government exclusionary...
Foreseeability as a Bar to the Doctrine of Equivalents
Jeremy T. Marr Several opinions in these cases suggest that a patentee should not be able to invoke the doctrine of equivalents to obtain protection from equivalents that one skilled in the art would have reasonably foreseen before the patent issued. Federal Circuit Judge Rader, in particular, is a strong advocate of such a “foreseeability bar.” The United States and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) also advanced the idea in their amici briefs to the Supreme Court in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyu Kabushiki Co., the Court’s latest case involving the issue. The Court’s opinion in...