After seven years of working with intellectual property and innovation in China, I’ve seen some of the ups and downs as well as the gross misunderstanding of Chinese innovation and IP in the West. I’d like to briefly summarize what I’ve seen. First, when it comes to innovation in science and industry, graduates of Chinese …
Under the America Invents Act, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was given broad new powers to “correct” past mistakes in issuing patents through the power given to the PTAB, the Patent Trials and Appeals Board. The PTAB is an administrative law that decides issues of patentability, formed on September 16, 2012 under …
A Surprising Insight About the USPTO’s “Patent Death Squad” Read More »
A book on World War II teaches a lesson for today on innovation. In Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas E. Ricks (New York: Penguin, 2017), we learn about some of the reasons England struggled to defend itself effectively in dealing with Germany. A key problem discussed by Ricks …
Innovation Fatigue: How Britain Almost Lost the War Against Hitler Read More »
Many of the greatest inventions in America came from immigrants. See Steve Brachman’s article, “American innovation has been fueled by immigrant inventors” at IP Watchdog. Nearly all of our inventions, in fact, came from people who were either immigrants or descendants of immigrants (sometimes we seem to forget our own roots!). Immigrants with skills and …
Be careful about the vehicle you’ve been driving. As sturdy, tangible, useful, and inventive as it looks to you, it may turn out to be merely an abstraction, perhaps nothing more than the mere idea of “transportation” or “going places,” making it unworthy of the thousands of patents protecting its numerous technologies — if the …
China’s housing market is in a bubble, in my opinion, for it seems to display some of the same excesses and questionable behavior that the United States had in real estate shortly before the big subprime mortgage crash in 2007. We have a flood of newly created cash flowing into the market at low interest …
The Housing Market in China: Warning Signs of a Bubble Economy Read More »
Abraham Lincoln said that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fires of genius.†Today the fires of genius and the fire of innovation itself is getting doused with something less helpful than fuel. These fires are being cooled and, in some cases, extinguished with harsh attacks on the IP rights that …
More Cold Water on the Fire of Innovation: Unnecessary Patent Reform Read More »
The US Supreme Court recently ruled that “abstract” concepts are not eligible for patents. The 2014 case, Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intl. or more simply Alice, is said by some to mean the death of thousands of patents if not entire industries. Critics such as Gene Quinn say it is unworkable, vague and …
Monopolies can innovate, just like elephants can play tennis. The results usually just aren’t very elegant or successful. Competition, on the other hand, is famous for driving innovation. Even in state-owned monopolies, like NASA’s initial monopoly on space exploration in the US, it was competition between nations during the rush to outer space and then …
The recent Alice decision from the Supreme Court threatens patents for many innovators working with computers, software, information, and knowledge–in short, the heart of the modern Knowledge Economy. By waving around the undefined word “abstract”–a word that the Court expressly refused to define–they have ruled that a major part of the economy is simply not …