Intellectual Property Directions

Dennis Crouch, a associate professor of law at University of Missouri has compiled a table of the time to first office action for a variety of technology centers. That is, how long does it take the patent office to get back to you with their (no doubt obviousness-based) rejection of most or all of your claims.

For the technology centers he lists the time ranges from a low of 1.7 years for Manufacturing Devices to a high of 3.7 yearsfor a couple of un-important technologies - fuel cells, batteries, and solar. Now remember, this is the time between filing and your first office action. It can easily take another year before your patent issues and during all that time you have been unable to enforce your patent rights. Heck, you didn’t even know if you were going to have any patent rights.

Mind you, if you filed a provisional application first, then your patent application has been public after 0.5 years from the filing date of the regular application, so you fuel cell companies out there have had your proprietary information hanging around the street, so to speak, for a little over 3 years and counting.

I always tell my clients that the patent system is supposed to be a deal between the inventor and society. You get limited time control over your invention in exchange for teaching the rest of us all those juicy details. This bargain breaks down, I think, when your teaching is published 3 or 4 years before you know that you have control over your invention, if you ever do get that control. During that time your competitors have had the chance to build on your proprietary information to your disadvantage.

It makes one wonder if it’s still worthwhile applying for a patent in a fast moving technology area.

Conventional wisdom dictates “Make your claims as broad as possible” but some inventors and their attorneys seem to forget that, broad or narrow, the claims have to define the invention you have, not the invention you wish you had. In a recent case, Liebel-Flarsheim Company overplayed their hand by filing (and getting) overly broad claims, made a losing bet by suing Medrad for infringing, and capped it all off by doubling down with an appeal in which their patent was ruled infringed but invalid.

Liebel’s invention was a fluid injector with a pressure jacket to contain the high pressures involved. At some point in the prosecution of their patent application someone got the bright idea that they could get broader protection by leaving out some of the limitations in their claims (a truth); they removed all references in the claims to the pressure jacket. The patent examiner allowed the claims.

The patent examiner did them no favor. When Liebel sued Medrad, they first lost the claims construction battle (the judge decided that the claims required the pressure jacket) but then won the appeals battle (the CAFC said NO pressure jacket was required). Based on the new claims construction, the district court concluded that Liebel’s patent was infringed (by the jacketless Medrad device) but that the claims were invalid because Liebel had failed to comply with the written description and enablement requirements!

This conclusion was to be expected - Liebel had never successfully made a jacketless system; their engineers testified that the use of a jacket was not a mere design option and that one of skill in the art would not know how to make a jacketless system; the specification described jacketless systems as “impractical“; the inventors had tried unsuccessfully to produce a jacketless system and that it was “too risky” to pursue further.

Yet, in spite of this understanding of the limits of the invention, in spite of having filed all claims with the limitation of a pressure jacket, Liebel and its patent attorney decided to delete these limitations from the claims and get a patent on the invention they wish they had invented.

Although I put most of the blame on Liebel’s patent attorneys, I also blame the patent examiner for allowing claims for which there was little or no support in the specification - no matter how loudly the patent attorneys cried.

Remember, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you have to go to the patent office with the invention you have, not the invention you want.

In April I mentioned that there was a constitutional challenge facing the PTO; that many of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences decisions might be nullified because many of the administrative judges sitting on that panel were, arguably, appointed unconstitutionally.

Apparently Congress and the President think they can wave a magic wand and retroactively make unconstitutional appointments okay. Wilmer-Hale reports:

On August 12, 2008, President Bush signed into law a statute intended to fix a perceived constitutional flaw in a 1999 statute governing the appointment of administrative law judges… Both the 2008 statutory fix and the 1999 statute raise constitutional questions of potential significance to those relying on BPAI or TTAB decisions issued over the past several years.

Wilmer-Hale further explains that the statue has 3 major provisions: first, giving the Secretary of Commerce the authority to appoint the administrative judges; second, giving the S of C the right to retroactively appoint a judge who had been appointed [arguably unconstitutionally] by the Director of the USPTO, effective on the date of the Director’s action - essentially waving a magic wand to make the unconstitutional appointments suddenly constitutional AND the decisions of the past 10 years valid; third, adding explicitly that the judges were de facto acting as judges and therefore their rulings can be accepted as valid (essentially because everyone at the time accepted the rulings as valid and it would be chaotic to go back and retry every case, given that the results would be the same, just with a now constitutionally appointed judge).

Don’t you wish you could solve your problems so easily! BTW, the 2nd and 3rd major provisions of this statute will probably also be challenged, so the PTO has only won this round.

Technical Editor Paul Rako of EDN (formerly Electronics Design News) recently posted a blog entitled File Your Own Patents. It’s really more of a meta-post since it is only announcing an upcoming article. It starts:

My IC designer buddy Don Sauer already has something like 40 patents, mostly when he worked at National Semiconductor. Now he is working up an article for me on how to do it cheap.

Mr. Sauer’s how-to solution, apparently, is to skip the patent attorney and file it yourself. To that I say, well, hogwash. Actually, what I said in a comment to the blog was:

I will grant you that a reasonably intelligent person can certainly file a patent application pro se; anyone who can read with comprehension can do most knowledge work. However, the suggestion that one should file pro se begs two questions; are you ready (and interested enough) to invest the time to become knowledgeable in patent law and procedure to do it as well as an attorney or patent agent AND how are you accounting for the opportunity cost of the time spent (both the learning time, which can be amortized over many patents but which is an on-going investment as the law/rules change, and the time prosecuting the patent).

If the answer to the first question is NO, then we all know about GIGO. And if the answer to the second question is “Duh” or “I do it on my own time” then I suggest you haven’t thought this through.

After being a senior R&D engineer for 25 years I decided I was interested enough in IP and now have my own company acting as a part-time, outsourced Director of Intellectual Property. Most of my clients would prefer to spend their time (and their subordinates’ time) working on the invention itself and to hire someone - myself, a patent agent, or, heaven forbid, an attorney - to translate the engineering into a patent application. I would suggest this route is more cost effective for a company than to divert engineering talent to a task for which they are not trained.