Blog by Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO Michelle Lee
Thursday Feb 20, 2014
The USPTO is approaching its 225th anniversary next year, and throughout the agency’s history our focus hasn’t wavered.
Our commitment was—is—and will be—to do everything we can to help foster an intellectual property system that
provides American entrepreneurs:
· the incentives they need to innovate;
· the tools to help them produce and protect their creative output; and
· the certainty they need to seek investments and balance risk while developing new technologies that benefit
us all.
Even before the president’s call to do more on patent reform last year, the USPTO had efforts underway to:
· Improve patent quality and metrics;
· Enhance examiner training, including input from industry experts; and
· Weed out troublesome patents through post-grant review proceedings.
Furthermore, ever since the administration’s announcement on June 4th, 2013—as my colleagues before me noted—
the USPTO has been hard at work implementing four executive actions.
EXECUTIVE ACTION #1
The first executive action aims to bring greater transparency of patent ownership information to the public. To this end,
the USPTO has begun a rulemaking process. Under our proposed new rule—which reflects significant public input—the
USPTO would collect patent ownership information for a patent or application and make that information available to all
via our website. The result would be increased transparency aimed at:
· enhancing competition,
· facilitating technology transfers,
· helping to ensure the highest quality patents, and
· leveling the playing field for innovators.
We are now collecting input from the public on the proposed rule and are pleased to announce today two public events:
one at our Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters on March 13th, and another in San Francisco, California, on March 26th.
We welcome your input.
EXECUTIVE ACTION #2
The second executive action called for new, targeted training for patent examiners to scrutinize certain types of patent
claims that may be overly broad and to increase patent clarity. We have since implemented a multi-phased training
program for all examiners to do just this. In addition, in the coming weeks we will launch a pilot program that uses
glossaries to define terms in a patent with the goal of further promoting patent clarity.
We have also conducted numerous public engagements to share ideas, feedback, experiences and insights on further
ways to improve patent quality, particularly for software-related patents, such as through our four, well-attended Software
Partnership Roundtables held within this past year. We recognize that a patent with clearly defined boundaries provides
notice to the public to help it avoid infringement, as well as costly and needless litigation down the road, when the patent
is in litigation.
EXECUTIVE ACTION #3
I am very pleased to announce today the culmination of the third executive action calling for new education and outreach
to assist those receiving a patent infringement letter. We have just this morning published a new online toolkit of such
resources, which you can find at www.uspto.gov/patentlitigation. These resources will help level the playing field for smaller
“Main Street” retailers and consumers—those who are not steeped in patent law or who cannot afford teams of patent
attorneys—with a variety of complementary resources. These include ways to find information about the patent being
asserted (such as assignment information or its past litigation history) to ways to determine if other businesses are being
sued on the same patent.
We know of no other online resource, where a recipient of a patent infringement letter can go to get as much information
as is available in this toolkit. And, importantly, the new online toolkit features a two-way communication stream so the
public can assist us in identifying additional, and we hope even better, resources for all to use.
EXECUTIVE ACTION #4
Finally, our fourth executive action called for an expansion of our already extensive public outreach efforts, as well as more
empirical research. I’ve already mentioned some of our outreach, which we’ve ramped up from an already high level. As for
empirical research, we are proud to announce that we have expanded our Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Scholars program.
That’s where we bring on board for a limited time talented scholars to examine intellectual property issues.
We’ve already recruited three distinguished scholars to research key issues related to patent litigation —Joshua Sarnoff of
DePaul University, Jonas Anderson of American University, and Elizabeth Bailey of U.C. Berkeley. We’ll be announcing more
scholars soon. By engaging legal and economic scholars with agency experts, we anticipate a wealth of new research and
data. Empirical examination of the interaction of various aspects of our patent system will provide insights on how to further
reduce unnecessary litigation and improve the quality of patents.
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