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 …
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 …
As I watch the decline of the US patent system, I have to marvel at how much loss the world is facing through the crushing barriers to innovation and job creation in the U.S. Once the beacon of innovation for the world, now would-be innovators are afraid to take the risks required to bring their …
Shock and Awe: The US Government’s War on Innovation 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 »
Many intellectual property practitioners worldwide are scratching their heads over what is happening to IP in the United States. There’s a revolution underway that over the past few years seems to have steadily eroded the value of patents and any semblance of predictability and order in the law. Patents can still be valuable, if you …
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 …
One of the important new antibiotics discovered and developed by pharmaceutical companies in the past few years is Rifampicin and its relative Rifamycin. These potent antibiotics remain key tools in fighting off serious infection. Their story begins with a soil sample taken from a pine forest on the French Riviera in 1957 that was then studied …
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, …
America’s Anti-Patent Revolution: Stoking the Engines of Innovation Fatigue Read More »
In response to recent court cases, the USPTO has dramatically revised its approach to dealing with a wide variety of patents. Its new guidelines to patent examiners on subject matter eligibility for inventions involving natural products seem to go way beyond the legal decisions on which they are allegedly based, adding extremely high barriers to patentability. …
Excluding Natural Products from Patent Protection? Read More »
Prisoners of Hope: How engineers and Others Get Lift for Innovating by Larry Vincent is an unusual book on innovation that I found to be a refreshing guide to strengthening innovation with great practical value. Part of what makes this book unusual and, for some, perhaps highly challenging, is that it is written from the …
Prisoners of Hope: Valuable Innovation Guide from Lanny Vincent Read More »