Leahy-Smith America
Invents Act Implementation
MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR
DAVID KAPPOS: USPTO Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Committee on AIA
Implementation
On Wednesday, June 20,
2012, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the agency's implementation
of the AIA. This was the second
Congressional oversight hearing directed to AIA implementation since the new
legislation was signed into law. Previously, on May 16, 2012, I testified
before the House Judiciary Committee about our AIA implementation activities. In brief, I informed the Senate Judiciary
Committee that the agency remains on track to issue final rules for various new
provisions that go into effect on September 16, 2012, and is actively preparing
proposed fees rule following two fee setting hearings held in February 2012. I also informed the Committee that the agency
has successfully implemented other provisions including (i) prioritized
examination for which over 4000 applications have been received, over 2300
first Office actions have been issued, and 200 patents have granted; (ii) the
pro bono program, which started in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is now operational
in Denver with plans to expand to 4 additional areas by the end of the calendar
year; and (iii) the satellite office program with the first office opening in
Detroit in July and additional office locations to be announced later this
summer.
MESSAGE FROM JANET
GONGOLA, PATENT REFORM COORDINATOR: Rules Delivered to OMB for Interagency
Clearance
The USPTO is progressing
well in its preparation and clearance of various final rules for provisions
that become effective on September 16, 2012. These provisions include inventor's
oath/declaration, preissuance submissions, citation of patent owner statements,
supplemental examination, inter partes review, post grant review, and covered
business method review. Specifically, as of
mid-June 2012, the USPTO submitted all of these final rules to the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) for interagency clearance. As soon as this process concludes, the agency
will publish the final rules in the Federal Register, which will occur no later
than August 16, 2012--one month before the provisions are effective. Search AIA text and see map
of "2012 Fall Roadshow" at: http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/index.jsp
Well before president Obama signed the Leahy-Smith
America Invents Act (AIA) into law
last September, the bill was already being hailed as the biggest overhaul to
U.S. patent law since 1952. Promising to
spur innovation, shorten application backlogs, and curtail legal costs, the
bipartisan bill easily passed both houses of Congress. But despite grand aims, lawmakers did not
rebuild the patent law from the ground up. Instead, they assembled a hodgepodge of
compromises, particularly between the interests of large software companies,
for whom patents have largely been a net drain, and those of biotechnology
firms, which favored strong patent protection. To the bill's mildest critics, AIA did not go
far enough in meeting the needs of the software industry. To bigger detractors, the new law is even
worse than the old system—it is the legislative equivalent of spaghetti code, a
jumble of rules whose meaning and implications will take judges and
intellectual property (IP) lawyers years to untangle. "This law is what the British call a
'dog's breakfast'—a little bit of everything," says University of
California–Irvine law professor Dan Burk, who testified during Congressional
deliberations last March. Although the
full implications are not known, most experts agree on which handful of changes
will have the greatest impact on the software industry, for which the threat of
patent-infringement claims has long been a thorn in its side. Consider, for example, the Texas case earlier
this year in which World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee testified for
the defense against a group of plaintiffs who claimed that anyone using
interactive Web features was trampling on their intellectual property. "There are thousands and
thousands of examples of software used by companies for making things,"
explains law professor John Allison of the University of Texas–Austin. In many other countries, patent laws enable
companies to keep such internally used techniques a trade secret without
worrying that they would be on the hook for patent infringement if someone else
decided to patent the same technique. In
the U.S., on the other hand, "under the old law you could lose your
ability to use technology that you invented," says John Duffy, a law
professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. The AIA's introduction of the prior-user
defense changes all of that. Especially
given the costs of patenting, firms will likely have less incentive to disclose
their inventions under this new provision, so the upshot could well be fewer
patent filings and more trade secrecy. Even so, only time will tell whether companies
will increase investment in technologies that they will not be patenting, says
Allison, an empirical legal scholar. One of the biggest and
most positive changes with the America Invents Act is the establishment of
prior-user rights as a defense against patent infringement suits. The America Invents Act's expansion of what
counts as "prior art" that can be used to invalidate a patent will
create new incentives to file early and often. Read more and see suggestions for further reading at: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151237-patently-inadequate/fulltext
Bookyard is a
project where Massimo Bartolini bring the public
library to the great outdoors.
In Ghent, Belgium, St.
Peter’s Abbey Vineyard has been a part of the town landscape since the Middle
Ages. Now this historic vineyard has
gotten a beautiful new addition, dubbed Bookyard, which was recently installed
by the Italian artist Massimo Bartolini. Designed
as part of the art festival Track:
A Contemporary City Conversation, 12 sweeping bookcases align with the Abbey’s grapevines and harken back
to an old world Europe that was once filled with bounded print, and free from
digital forms. See pictures at: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/bookyard
Every horse in the 2012 Kentucky Derby is a cousin of one sort or another to every other
horse. In fact, each horse racing is a
descendant of an English-born stallion named “Bonnie Scotland.” In 1872, William
Giles Harding bought a stallion for stud that had been raced in England a few
years earlier. The stallion’s English
racing career wasn’t particularly distinguished, but he had an impeccable
bloodline. That horse was named Bonnie Scotland. While at Belle Meade
Plantation near Nashville, Bonnie
Scotland’s performance at stud far surpassed his performance on the race
course. Bonnie Scotland appears in the genealogical charts of many of American
racing’s greatest horses: Secretariat.
Northern Dancer. Seattle Slew. A.P. Indy. Bonnie
Scotland died in 1880 in Davidson County, Tennessee, after serving eight
highly successful years at stud, siring the ancestors of all of the 2012 Derby
contenders, and thousands of other thoroughbreds. http://mnemosynesmagicmirror.blogspot.com/2012/05/kentucky-derby-2012-from-pedigree.html
We have all heard about the wonders of frictionless sharing, whereby social networks
automatically let our friends know what we are reading or listening to, but
what we hear less about is frictionless surveillance. Though we invite some tracking — think of our
mapping requests as we try to find a restaurant in a strange part of town —
much of it is done without our awareness. “Every year, private companies spend millions
of dollars developing new services that track, store and share the words,
movements and even the thoughts of their customers,” writes Paul Ohm, a
law professor at the University of Colorado. “These invasive services have proved
irresistible to consumers, and millions now own sophisticated tracking devices
(smartphones) studded with sensors and always connected to the Internet.” Mr. Ohm labels them tracking devices. So does Jacob Appelbaum, a developer and
spokesman for the Tor project, which allows users to browse the Web
anonymously. Scholars have called them
minicomputers and robots. Everyone is
struggling to find the right tag, because “cellphone” and “smartphone” are
inadequate. This is not a semantic game.
Names matter, quite a bit. In politics and advertising, framing is
regarded as essential because what you call something influences what you think
about it. That’s why there are battles
over the tags “Obamacare” and “death panels.” In just the past few
years, cellphone companies have honed their geographic technology, which has
become almost pinpoint. The surveillance
and privacy implications are quite simple. If someone knows exactly where you are, they
probably know what you are doing. Cellular
systems constantly check and record the location of all phones on their
networks — and this data is particularly treasured by police departments and
online advertisers. Cell companies
typically retain your geographic information for a year or longer, according to data gathered by the Justice Department.
The annual July event is called Ragbrai, the Des Moines Register's Annual Great
Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, draws about 25,000 cyclists each year. And there's a reason it's called a ride not a
race. Every 10 miles or so, cyclists
pass through a small Iowa town, where churches, restaurants and ad hoc vendors
line the streets to tempt bikers with homemade pie, buttered corn on the cob
and pork chops. Those three delicacies comprise the "Holy Grail of
Ragbrai," says T.J. Juskiewicz, the event's director. Many cyclists have trained for months to be
able to bike about 70 miles a day past rolling fields of tasseled corn and
sturdy soybeans under the blistering heat of a Midwestern summer sun, and, this
year in a terrible drought. The ride
isn't just for amateurs: Lance Armstrong has made four appearances on Ragbrai,
most recently last year. While Mr.
Armstrong isn't planning to be there for this year's trek, 65 cyclists raising
money for his foundation, known as Livestrong, do plan to ride. Cyclists start the ride on the banks of the
Missouri River and end when they dip their wheels into the waters of the
Mississippi. This is Ragbrai's 40th
anniversary, and cyclists will cover 471.1 miles from July 22 to 28. Organizers plug the ride as the "oldest,
largest and longest bicycle touring event in the world." Ovens are ablaze in
Zearing. Bev Chance and 10 other church women are preparing to bake 50 to 60
pies for visitors cycling through the town, which has a population of 550. "We've got banana cream, raisin cream,
pumpkin, mincemeat and pecan," says the 69-year-old retired nurse.
"Cherry, apple, blueberry, blackberry, oh, and raspberry." Mr. Pork Chop Jr., as Matt Bernhard calls
himself, says sometimes the heat and hassle of preparing for the ride—setting
up two giant grills and cooking for hours in 90-degree-plus heat—is a drag. "I would probably quit if it wasn't for
Ragbrai itself," Mr. Bernhard says. "But Dad's been on it for 30 years. It gets in your blood." The cyclists, he says, "expect that
they'll come over the hill and they'll see those pork chops." It's that camaraderie that keeps cyclists
coming back for more Ragbrai. And more
food. Jeannette Neumann
Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444330904577535281743599436.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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