PatCon9 at University of Kansas
Yesterday and today, the University of Kansas School of Law hosted the ninth annual Patent Conference—PatCon9—largely organized by Andrew Torrance. Schedule and participants are here. For those who missed it, here's a recap of my live Tweets from the conference. (For those who receive Written Description posts by email: This will look much better—with pictures and parent tweets—if you visit the website version.)
#PatCon9 starting at @kulawschool w/ @lexvivo welcome. Schedule here: https://t.co/V76ys9nL2D— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
First is "Roles and Influence of Patent Blogs" w/ me, Kevin Noonan, @IowaPatentLaw, @CamillaHrdy. My preliminary thoughts here: https://t.co/3kx1VWvnKT
PatCon history in T-shirts #PatCon9 pic.twitter.com/GTa86O7fRE— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Christal Sheppard (@ipwe_, former director of 1st @uspto regional office): Why do we need a team of lawyers to determine who owns a patent? Why can't lay people figure out a patent's quality or value? Why is it so hard to negotiate a license? Can commercial patent analytics help?— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
.@IowaPatentLaw asks Sheppard for comparison w/ @colleen_chien's Predicting Patent Litigation (https://t.co/O0SbP575px) and notes difficulty making predictions based on rare events. @CamillaHrdy asks about commercial competitors. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
David Olson (@PIEBCLaw): How can patentees use licenses to price discriminate under current exhaustion law post-Impression v. Lexmark? A topic dear to my heart! https://t.co/XaV7WAOD7I #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Q from @IowaPatentLaw: What's the legal hook for using high creation costs & low distribution costs to decide something can be a license rather than a sale? Doesn't that apply to books? Olson: Maybe it could apply to books. See abandoned Aspen program. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Matthew Sipe (@gwlaw VAP): Patent Law's Latent Philosophical Schism. Argues both sides have it wrong: utilitarians overstate relevance of their theories, moral perspectives understate b/c important for understanding infringement doctrine. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Infringement, by contrast, involves lots of moral concerns: damage enhancement, DOE, inequitable conduct, prior use. Injunctions have greater moral differentiation post-eBay: distinction in cases between "good" trolls like universities and "bad" trolls. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Where, in Sipe's view, does this split come from?— 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐡 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐧𝐮𝐛𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐭 (@emptydoors) April 5, 2019
1. the adjudicatory split between the USPTO and district courts
2. the influence of traditional property law
3. the mix of private-law and public-law features that patents exhibit#PatCon9
Sipe notes @wsurferesq & O'Dorisio's mock jury finding that infringers are more likely to escape liability if plaintiff is NPE: https://t.co/TI3H237dui (Plus more I can't fit in a Tweet. Read the paper!) #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Answers: No, @lexvivo doesn't see influence of these int'l legal changes in patent data. My Q: How does this relate to studies like this one? https://t.co/249vV5hEIZ #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
For the first-day lunchtime discussion, Ian Wetherbee and @Jay_Yonamine of @Google discuss the infrastructure efforts of #GooglePatents to make patent data more accessible and useful. #PatCon9— 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐡 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐧𝐮𝐛𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐭 (@emptydoors) April 5, 2019
Ian Wetherbee: Examples of what you can do easily w/ Google's BigQuery patent data: What CPCs have most CAFC cases? Which Orange Book patents have gov't interest statements? How do common office action sequences change over time? #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Dmitry Karshtedt from @GWLaw seeks in his paper "Obviousness: Before and After" to take the timing of the obviousness inquiry (as of filing) more seriously. #PatCon9— 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐡 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐧𝐮𝐛𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐭 (@emptydoors) April 5, 2019
At #PatCon9, Dmitry Karshtedt argues courts should classify evidence into ex ante and ex post categories in assessing obviousness. For more on when "hindsight evidence" is appropriate (including for patents), see @maggiewittlin's @ColumLRev article: https://t.co/XG99dpvgHa— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Bernard Chao (@wsurferesq): In product mislabeling 3x3x2 test on mTurk, found evidence that salience & anchoring can lead to overcompensation. Relevant to patent damages on multicomponent products? Paper here: https://t.co/25QMnPmt9M #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
Next at #PatCon9: @ProfGReilly on taxonomy of erreoneous patent grants (false positives). For broader taxonomy of patent office errors (incl. false negatives) and effects on incentives, see @syelderman: https://t.co/tgc9KkajNW— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
.@ProfGReilly argues #3 & 4 not helped by current PTAB structure or proposed increase in examination expenditures. Plans to do empirical work on relative importance of categories. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
In follow-up work, @jjonasanderson will survey patentees of these unenforceable patents to ask why. @ProfDSchwartz has useful addendum: Also survey patentees of medical method patents that were cut from sample b/c they are enforceable (e.g., tied to device) as control. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
.@NormanSiebrasse: Utility std similar in US and Europe, but used more in Europe—why? Genus/species rules similar in both. Europe focuses on information, not possession, but likely similar results. (There are 50+ slides, so zooming through!)— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
.@NormanSiebrasse tentatively argues for revival of "Biogen insufficiency": scope shouldn't exceed technical contribution (see https://t.co/S6esxeRwfJ). Is this similar to @marklemley's arguments on point of novelty & functional claiming (https://t.co/1wkbSi2Dot)? #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 5, 2019
First #PatCon9 talk Saturday morning: @MelissaWasserma discussing her work w/ @MichaelFrakes2 on the time allocation for patent examination, which I recently reviewed for @IReadJotwell: https://t.co/81kgJfUuRc— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
Pairolero: First-action decision has omitted variable bias—patent quality becomes correlated w/ grade & experience because of prosecution delays. Also argues time crunch can be beneficial: incentivizes use of examiner's amendment. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
Super interesting work but Nick is looking at first office allowance only. The greater use of examiner amendments at higher gs level to explain differences in first office allowances, as Nick points out, may not extend to full allowance.— Melissa Wasserman (@MelissaWasserma) April 6, 2019
.@lexvivo & @ProfGReilly ask about costs of examiner's amendments to claim clarity & notice. @ProfDSchwartz says in his experience these often occur due to deadlines (procrastination!) and asks about kind of amendments. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
And then a nice discussion of why examiner amendments may defeat the public notice function of patents because the documentation of the interviews is so sparse.— Bernard Chao (@wsurferesq) April 6, 2019
.@ProfDSchwartz & @ccotropia: Abandoned applications are MORE valuable than issued patents on a number of dimensions, including more likely to be used as prior art when rejecting other patents. #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
This is tangential to @ProfDSchwartz's paper, but since many scholars seem to have not picked up on this point: my survey work (https://t.co/rxtpdpaFfy) suggests that researchers aren't currently deterred from reading patents due to willful infringement concerns. pic.twitter.com/wNDpbDTevt— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
.@ccotropia finds people are more likely to notice patent status when it says "patent-pending" than "patented." Longer? #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
A compelling new project from Lisa Ouellette (@PatentScholar) and Daniel @DanielJHemel argues that the U.S. opioid epidemic reflects a failure of innovation institutions. Illustrative of the argument are stories of two drugs: OxyContin (oxycodone) and Evzio (naloxone). #PatCon9— 𝐒𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐡 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐧𝐮𝐛𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐭 (@emptydoors) April 6, 2019
Next at #PatCon9: @PatentScholar (joint work with @DanielJHemel ) argues that innovation institutions contributed to the opioid epidemic in a variety of ways including that addictive drugs have negative externalities and drugs that treat overdose have positive externalities.— Melissa Wasserman (@MelissaWasserma) April 6, 2019
Today I'm presenting Jefferson's Taper at the 9th Annual Patent Conference (#PatCon9) at @kulawschool. Slides at https://t.co/2qxK6R3gv0, draft at https://t.co/7LVVyWB920. Comments always welcome.— Jeremy Sheff (@jnsheff) April 6, 2019
Final #PatCon9 panel starts w/ Tabrez Ebrahim proposing (1) using AI at PTO to identify AI-generated patents and (2) adding to PAIR to make patent prosecution big data available to PTO & public.— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
Bill Rich (Washburn) argues patents should receive protection under the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which empowers Congress to override state immunity. For his prior work on patents & state immunity, see https://t.co/LMRffYwjsT #PatCon9— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
Ending #PatCon9 on a high note: @emptydoors quantifies extent to which PTAB decisions are consistent with prior or subsequent court decisions on the same patents & compares w/ TTAB. Related to projects by @ProfGReilly @syelderman @apublicgood.— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
Thanks to @lexvivo & @kulawschool for hosting a terrific #PatCon9! My blog recap of my live tweets is here: https://t.co/VzlUHuKVOH— Lisa L. Ouellette (@PatentScholar) April 6, 2019
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