The real US patent 'crisis'; The Hill, December 9, 2019

Brian Pomper, The Hill; The real US patent 'crisis'

"The true crisis in our patent system is the dire state of Section 101 jurisprudence, the area of law determining what is and what is not eligible for patent protection. For nearly 150 years, Section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act was interpreted to allow inventions to be patented across broad categories and subject matters. These patents incentivized American R&D and innovation and led to countless technological and medical breakthroughs.

Starting in 2010, however, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that have upended longstanding settled law and narrowed the scope of patent-eligible subject matter...

Restoring clear patent rights will be essential to maintaining a strong and healthy U.S. innovation ecosystem...

So yes, patent quality is important, and we must provide the USPTO with the resources it needs to carefully weigh patent applications and make consistent, defensible and predictable decisions. But the real patent crisis we face is the inability of innovators to get patents for their new inventions under Section 101."

A patent lawyer switches teams; Crain's Chicago Business, July 8, 2017

Claire Bushey, Crain's Chicago Business; A patent lawyer switches teams

"Unlike a ​ traditional law firm, Blackbird is structured as a limited liability company, not a partnership, and it has no clients. Instead, it acquires patents from inventors or small businesses. Blackbird then sues companies for patent infringement on its own behalf, and it shares an unspecified percentage of any settlement or judgment with the original patent owner.

Blackbird filed 107 lawsuits between September 2014 and May, including against Amazon, Fitbit, Netflix and kCura, a Chicago company that makes software used by law firms. It has settled with Amazon. The other three cases are ongoing.

Three months ago it sued San Francisco-based Cloudflare, and in May the website infrastructure company blasted Blackbird as "a dangerous new breed of patent troll" and launched a scorched-earth campaign against the 11-person business. Cloudflare, valued at $3.2 billion and with a seven-employee Champaign office, offered to the public a total of $50,000 for evidence that would invalidate any of 35 patents Blackbird holds. It also lodged ethics complaints with legal disciplinary bodies in Illinois and Massachusetts, and it was successful in prompting Illinois Rep. Keith Wheeler (R-Oswego) to introduce a bill that would outlaw Blackbird's business model...

A lawyer at Intel coined the epithet "patent troll" in 2001 to refer to Anthony Brown, a one-time Jenner & Block partner turned serial patent lawsuit filer, and his Chicago lawyer, the late Ray Niro. A troll asserts a patent of dubious quality, hoping the company will settle the infringement lawsuit quickly for maybe $50,000 to avoid spending millions on litigation. Detractors often slap the label on patent holders who do not manufacture a product, so-called nonpracticing entities."

Commemorating Five Years of the America Invents Act; USPTO Director's Forum Blog: Guest Blog by Dana Robert Colarulli, Director of the Office of Governmental Affairs, 9/26/16

USPTO Director's Forum Blog: Guest Blog by Dana Robert Colarulli, Director of the Office of Governmental Affairs; Commemorating Five Years of the America Invents Act:

"We’ve come a long way in five years. The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), signed in 2011 by President Obama, modernized the U.S. patent system and, as a result, helped strengthen America’s competitiveness in the global economy. Together with our stakeholders, the USPTO sought to implement the act consistent with the intent of Congress to increase certainty in our nation’s intellectual property (IP) landscape and enable the brightest ideas and most ambitious endeavors in the world to come to light...

The USPTO has delivered on that promise by reducing the patent application backlog by nearly 30 percent from its high in early 2009, speeding up examination including introducing a fast track option with discounts for small entities, and leveraging the increased financial stability and fee setting authority provided by the act to reinvest user fees into increasing quality under Director Lee’s Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative.

And just this week, the USPTO and the Economics & Statistics Administration at the Department of Commerce released an updated report on the impact of IP on the U.S. economy, reiterating in quantifiable terms the importance of a well-functioning IP system."