Director Kappos, of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), writes on his blog this week about how the Office intends to fast-track the examination of patent applications that deal with so-called “green” technologies.  Great headline for a month ago, when [...]]]>

“Awe!  Come ON!  I made a movie about it.  That proves it’s true.”

Director Kappos, of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), writes on his blog this week about how the Office intends to fast-track the examination of patent applications that deal with so-called “green” technologies.  Great headline for a month ago, when the popularized position was that anthropogenic climate change (formerly known as “global warming”) was a *proven* phenomenon.  However, recent developments have put those findings in serious doubt.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, as Director Kappos clearly hasn’t, emails were leaked last month from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – a world-renowned climate change research center – which reveal a “trick” being employed by researchers to massage temperature statistics (source).  Seems that a decline in temperature didn’t fit into the doomsday scenario that’s being thrown about to justify new grant money, new cap-and-trade legislation, and new taxes.  The emails openly discuss the deletion of historic source data and ways to discredit scientific journals that have published skeptic papers, as a couple of examples (source).

Moving back to the IP tie-in, the USPTO is continuing to drink the climate change kool aid by proposing that so-called “green” patent applications should be given priority treatment in examination.  Kappos’s announcement of the policy was timed to coincide with the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.  In that announcement, the Director explains the impetus for such an initiative:

As I have often said, the USPTO is committed to dramatically reducing the backlog and average patent pendency time across the board.  As we work toward this goal, we are going to pilot a program that will give priority to applications that combat climate change and foster job creation in the green tech sector.  The Green Tech patent pilot program will decrease the time it takes to obtain patent protection for green tech innovations by an average of 12 months.  (source)

One has to wonder what other types of applications will be “de-prioritized,” in order to let climate-change-fighting inventors skip the line.  It seems clear that this initiative would do absolutely nothing to improve the average pendency time across all patent applications.  It is truly odd that, at the Patent Office, where a science degree is required to prosecute or examine applications, they’re not letting a silly thing like the absence of a scientific foundation stop them from disparaging the majority of the inventing community.  It certainly isn’t stopping the charlatan proponents of climate change theory from generating a city-sized carbon belch to gather and talk about how to reduce carbon emissions.

Once again, the Director concludes his blog post, claiming that he welcomes comments and feedback, but somehow my comments thereto on this subject failed to clear moderation.

Not that I want to club anyone to death with stories about first-to-file patent reform, but given that Director Kappos has begun beating the patent reform drum, it’s becoming more important that all the facts are known.  Up to now, there really hasn’t been any consensus on whether [...]]]>

Professor Dennis Crouch
University of Missouri
School of Law

Not that I want to club anyone to death with stories about first-to-file patent reform, but given that Director Kappos has begun beating the patent reform drum, it’s becoming more important that all the facts are known.  Up to now, there really hasn’t been any consensus on whether moving to a first-to-file priority system would be a drastic change.  Dennis Crouch, over at Patently-O, insists that the Director may be using flawed statistics to demonstrate that change will not be so bad.  Interestingly enough, after Professor Crouch and a few others posted comments about it on Director Kappos’s blog, the comments were closed off, ending the discussion on that forum.  I guess Mr. Kappos is not really interested in hearing from the patent community — despite portraying that he will listen to feedback.

In an effort to come up with some real numbers, Professor Crouch has created a survey that is designed to record the position of patent professionals on this issue.  If you have an opinion, one way or the other, you should take a minute, click over, and take the survey.  You can’t complain later about how things end up, if you didn’t participate in the discussion.

UPDATE:  It looks like Kappos’s blog has let through a few more comments, but they are clearly censoring responses.

This story was originally posted on The Tactical IP Blog.

The U.S. Government Agency that is responsible for validating which technologies are new and useful has discovered a not so new, yet highly useful tool: web logs.

In an effort to open a line of communication between the USPTO and the [...]]]>

Kappos: “Hey Ted, can you show me how these here tubes work?”

The U.S. Government Agency that is responsible for validating which technologies are new and useful has discovered a not so new, yet highly useful tool: web logs.

In an effort to open a line of communication between the USPTO and the practitioners who deal with the office on a daily basis, newly sworn in Director David Kappos published the inaugural post on his new blog.  In it, he takes up the long-raging debate over whether moving to a first-to-file system of prosecution would have a drastic impact on the U.S. patent system.

The United States is unique in its position that the first to invent, not the first to file an application, should be the person to receive a patent for her invention.  The rest of the civilized world holds the opposite view, giving patent protection to the first party to have her paperwork in.  The first-to-file system eliminates the possibility of complicated and expensive arguments over who can prove the date of her invention.  The downside is that someone could miss out on a patent for her invention, simply because she took an extra day to draft an application.

Congress has slipped this change into several proposed patent reform bills over the last several years, but it has failed, as of yet, to reach bicameral approval.

This post was originally published on The Tactical IP Blog.