The past 15 years have seen an unprecedented attack on patents and patent-owners in the United States. Orchestrated by foreign nations, multinational corporations, and a variety of other groups, largely funded by similar vested interests, this attack has reduced much of the value formerly associated with patented innovations. In past issues of our newsletter we have described how patent owners can no longer realistically expect to block sales of products that infringe their patents through the injunction process, how infringers can conspire to divide patented processes among several actors to avoid infringement, how multiple infringers must now be sued separately, rather than joined in a single action, and how delays at the Patent Office and increasing fees put university researchers, solo inventors, and small companies at a disadvantage. We have also been counseling our clients to help them construct valuable patent strategies.
In the latest round of anti-patent actions, a committee of the Federal Courts including some noted judges and attorneys has issued a model order that they recommend be adopted by federal trial courts to govern patent suits. Such model orders are usually adopted quickly and without significant change by courts around the country. What is troubling about the present document, “A MODEL ORDER LIMITING EXCESS PATENT CLAIMS AND PRIOR ART” is that for the history of our patent system, which dates back to the time of Thomas Jefferson, inventors have always been able to present claims in as much detail as they wish, so that their patents would clearly and particularly cover all aspects of their inventions, and, at least since the 1950s, inventors and their attorneys have been required by both the Patent Law and the rules of the Patent Office to submit every relevant item of prior art of which they were aware. The background of the model order cites a study that shows that litigated patents contain an average of 24 claims, and cite 31 prior art references, which the committee calls, “problematically excessive.”
Some recent cases have seen individual judges impose limits on patent owners, requiring that they limit the number of patents in a suit, and that they throw away claims in the patents that they assert to reach some arbitrarily small number. In other cases, the number of products accused of infringement has been limited by court order. All of this trimming is claimed to streamline cases and to promote the administration of justice. In reality, however, such rules are evidence that our judicial system often fails to handle the technical complexity of our modern technological world. When it takes teams of hundreds of researchers years of effort to develop and commercialize complex inventions such as synthetic proteins, chips with millions of components, and software with tens of millions of lines of code, the refusal of our courts to expend the mental energy needed to understand and to protect such innovations harms innovators. For courts to say to inventors, you have done the hard work of creating value, but we require you to be able to explain it to judges and juries in monosyllabic terms, and to choose, “not more than ten claims from each patent, and not more than a total of 32 claims,” means that for some inventors, they will have a more difficult task to defend the value that they create.
Inventors must and will respond. Already, we are counseling clients to submit more patent applications with fewer claims per application. In litigation, the proposed limits will mean that separate law suits will have to be filed on small groups of patents against the same defendant. The erosion of the patent system has caused some innovators to opt for trade secrecy, at least in part, rather than patenting every aspect of their inventions, and this impoverishes our entire society, because it keeps technical advances out of the public view, which slows follow-on innovation.
We are confident that Americans will continue to innovate, despite the limits being imposed on the patent system. We are confident that we, and others who value our tradition of individual innovation will continue to find strategies to protect the value generated by inventors. Because we believe in the long-term value of innovation and the patent system that protects innovation, we at LW&H continue to develop new strategies for our clients, and particularly university researchers, garage inventors, startup companies, and established concerns to implement effective and efficient legal strategies for protecting their inventions.
— Lawrence A. Husick, Esq.