My latest post here at Innovation Fatigue lamented the actions of the USPTO in their apparent war on patents involving natural products. New information makes the story even more troubling than before, indicating that more than just judicial error and bureaucratic blindness was involved. The steps taken appear much more deliberate and political than that, and reflect an increasingly revolutionary attitude toward patent rights holders, where IP is viewed as the problem, not as a vital tool to benefit society.
First, new insight into the actions of the USPTO comes from a leaked USPTO PowerPoint used to train patent examiners on the radical new USPTO guidelines implementing their extreme response to the Myriad decision. A PDF of the PowerPoint slides, coupled with the USPTO guidelines and some vital commentary have been compiled by Hal Wegner and are kindly provided by a great champion of IP (quality IP, that is), Greg Aharonian, Director, Center for Global Innovation/Patent Metrics. Wegner observes that the new guidelines, which require inventions involving natural products to be “significantly different” than what may be found in nature provide no concrete, objective test to determine when a claimed invention is “significantly different” from ineligible subject matter. Is a creative device made out of wood significantly different from naturally occurring wood? Is a new anti-cancer drug extracted from a newly discovered fungus significantly different? Who knows? The uncertainty created by the test can be disastrous for property rights holders. Wegner points out that a much more useful and concrete test already exists: the Papesch test for determining whether the claimed invention as a whole is nonobvious from the prior art. But this was never mentioned by the Supreme Court in the infamous Myriad decision and has been neglected by the USPTO as well.
In a recent email to his subscribers, Greg Aharonian shares an email sent to him by a biotech patent examiner within the USPTO. It helps explain some of the motivation behind the seemingly crazy USPTO action, which isn’t so crazy at all from the perspective of politics:
1610 examiner here again. We examiners in biotech at the PTO also would like to know ourselves who wrote those ridiculous guidelines. We are being told to stretch 101 as much as possible. The guidelines say that, for example, if claim 1 is an assay method, with steps such as centrifugation, column chromatography, mixing reagents in a test tube, spectrophotometric measurements, if each category of technique was known at the time of the invention (is routine/well known/conventional), forget about whether the step was ever done with the molecules in the claim, we have to write how each step is 103-obvious w/o using 103’s word “obvious”. We have to write somehow how the combination is 103-obvious, w/o the using 103 word “obvious”. Then we have to reject the claim under 101. We don’t know if the PTO requires art cited for each step that is obvious.
Now, Funk Bros. v. Kalo Inoculant, one example in the guidelines, is a decision in which the patented composition, which I think is amazingly clever, was considered not to be inventive. The decision involves 103, not 101. How could the PTO so thoroughly confuse 101 with 103?…
Myriad was politically motivated, filed by the ACLU, because poor people can’t afford the BRCA1 gene test. OK, this is the Obama era, max political correctness. Current politics ruled. The test, however, is expensive and difficult to do. It’s not in the test strip category, like a pregnancy test.
But Mayo v. Prometheus takes the cake. The drug and its metabolites are not natural products. So what is the natural phenomenon that the justices never mentioned? And the clever part is looking for a target concentration of one synthetic metabolite in red blood cells.
What seems to be forgotten is that patents are intellectual property and that patented inventions are new and useful. When intellectual activity is maligned rather than rewarded, the economy goes with it. The PTO seems to be under pressure from the White House, because biotech patents don’t jive with Obamacare, which is backfiring.
Yes, it is high time for patent attorneys to fight back (don’t laugh Greg). David Kappos cut our time for examination, but he increased customer service. Time for the customers to demand more service.
The biotech community seems afraid to speak out too loudly on these outrages, but I think savvy investors see a dimmed future and have begun pulling some of their money out of the field (my guess about the recent plunge). The patent community and the business community is remaining far too silent, perhaps afraid of attracting political wrath, but the losses of IP rights could seriously set back innovation in the US and beyond.
China is ramping up its IP system and strengthening protection, while America is declaring IP to be the problem and weakening IP rights. Who’s going to own the future? I’m living in beautiful Shanghai now, where a lot of the future seems to be sprouting in an increasingly pro-IP environment. Meanwhile, I hope America will come to its senses and return to vigorously protecting IP rights and promoting innovation, not innovation fatigue.