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Malone ultimately won at the PTAB after he appealed to the Federal Circuit (the court of appeals in all patent cases) and that court reversed the PTAB’s invalidity finding. Thereafter both the district court and PTAB upheld the validity of his patents.
What makes you say this? As an "insider," I can honestly say I think folks are mostly just trying to get it right. I don't see corporations gaming or having a big advantage in the patent system.
So does that mean that the courts still have final say? Watching the video, it made it seem like the PTAB did. So if the PTAB invalidated a patent, your case in court no longer as merit as your patent no longer exists.
Ongoing GB. Judges ruled that we violated the prosecution bar 2 1/2 years ago! Complete BS according to anyone with knowledge BTW. We had oral arguments over the summer and he still hasn't made a final ruling. I will let you know when we win the big $$$.
I think a "reasoned" argument about anything that remains within political dialectic and rubric that is not highly uncontroversial to certain members of this board is difficult having. Careful, you're a pure patent guy who works Big Law in the area. You may not be dealing with the level of insider (regulatory capture, man!) knowledge of terms, issues, and other basics.
I'm going to PM you a stories about a couple of the rulings that we've had to endure. I don't want to make them public but we have experienced the influence big corporations can apparently wield in patent situations. My situation is not one of a patent troll--our founder invented some tech and patented it. By the time the patent was issued, a big tech company had stolen it and included it in their products. I believe our patent has 1000s of hours investigation by 100s of examiners--it is one of the most investigated patents in US history.
The PTAB’s decisions on the merits are appealable to the judiciary, in this case the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and then ultimately the Supreme Court (which has taken up a surprising number of patent cases in recent years).
Other than they have more money and therefore more influence, but on a case by case basis, I really don’t see corporations getting any special treatment. Any litigator knows it’s quite the opposite—a corporation getting up against an individual inventor in front of a lay jury usually starts off with a disadvantage.Come on man.
I'm with you on restoring injunctive relief. The whole point of a patent is to grant a monopoly and give the patent holder the ability to exclude others. Kind of silly if you take away that fundamental point, though there are some good public policy reasons it needs to be really carefully managed (e.g., if you give a WiFi patent holder the ability to exclude all WiFi product makers from the market without limitation, that's pretty dangerous for public policy).
Happens all the time. I've been on both ends of it. Sure we win a lot before trial, and most settle before trial anyway, but patent trials happen all the time. And generally speaking I'd much rather have the plaintiff side of your average case than a defendant's side when it comes to trial.
I've been meaning to reply to this - sorry for the delay.
They are written for lawyers, by lawyers, because patents are useless to everyone else. Patent lawyers charge a lot because every word that we write will be scrutinized and pulled apart later in litigation if your patent is valuable. Writing a good patent application and prosecuting it well is not easy. If you pay less, often you get less. Trouble is, a very small percentage of patents are ever licensed or litigated, and so you can never know until years later whether you should have spent more or should have spent less....
This. May I add, though a dilettante, is that your probably talking about the claims made in the application. The language in the patent is intentionally legal because it describes the metes and bounds of what the patent actually protects intellectually, if I'm not chiming in here and not mistaken. That means it largely takes a specialist to note what part of your invention is protected from infringement. The more vague you can be while being specific, the better chance you'll have enforcing your patent and the broader the scope of its protections.
I've been meaning to reply to this - sorry for the delay.
Anyway, I agree that many (most?) patents are awful to read. I think most patent attorneys try to make them readable, but they are definitely filled with legalese. Part of the problem is that clients want to go as broad as possible. So if somebody invents a widget that has three beams that form a triangle and a wheel at each end of the triangle, they might say "well it could work with only two wheels or only two beams". The beams could be connected in the shape of a triangle but could be other shapes. Thus we end up drafting something takes a simple triangle with 3 wheels and turns it into "a geometric shape having a plurality of support members having at least one wheel." If we don't cover all of the possibilities, then company A makes a minor change to the widget and can get around your patent. It just gets unwieldy and it's no more fun to write than it is to read. I'd prefer to make them easier to write and read, but we definitely don't do it to keep ourselves employed.
In short, don't blame those of us that write the patent applications, blame the litigators
