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28 September 2015Patents

WIPR survey: Readers say AIA has helped patent owners

Changes to the US patent system implemented by the America Invents Act (AIA) have had a positive effect on patent owners, WIPR readers have overwhelmingly declared.

Earlier this month, September 16, marked three years to the day that certain provisions of the AIA were enacted.

They included inter partes reviews and covered business method (CBM) reviews, which are trial proceedings carried out at the specially created Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review patentability.

As part of a special news report on the act’s anniversary, lawyers told WIPR that the changes had made the US “one of the busiest patent dockets in the country” and bred a new type of “patent troll”.

Jeff Whittle, partner at law firm Hogan Lovells, told WIPR that the reviews, along with the 2014 Alice v CLS Bank decision by the US Supreme Court—which stemmed from a CBM review—have seen patents come under “continuous attack”, particularly in the financial and software industries.

He added that a new type of “abusive challenge” has emerged where hedge fund managers and licensing entities have opposed patents in order to affect publicly traded stock prices in what “some call the new patent troll”.

Responding to our most recent survey on whether the AIA has been positive for patent owners, 83% of WIPR readers said they believed the bill has been positive for patent owners.

But one respondent said: “In theory it might have been, but in practice it isn’t.”

For this week’s question we ask: “Michelle Lee, the USPTO’s director, has expressed concern over a lack of women being named as inventors on granted patents. Is this a problem that you are aware of?”

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Patents
26 September 2016   WIPR readers are divided on the impact the America Invents Act has had on the patent landscape for inventors and businesses in the US.