Search the archive.

Policy changes at administrative agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are unlikely to lead the nightly news or appear above the fold in national newspapers. But, the USPTO might be the most important agency your average American hasn’t heard of. How it works, or doesn’t, has billion-dollar consequences for the U.S. innovation economy, and for consumers.

Celente's optimistic prognosis for gold is due to his grim macroeconomic outlook, as well as gold's role as a hedge against financial instability. He claimed that 2023 would witness a "market meltdown," and suggested that the U.S. government would use war to distract its citizens from the harsh economic reality.

"This is very important… we're talking about a market meltdown [in 2023]," said Celente. "The only thing that's keeping the markets up are interest rates. They go high, and the market goes down. When all else fails, they take you to war."

The importance of patents has not diminished over time. To the contrary, patents played a central role in supporting the industrial revolution in 19th-century America and were associated with key U.S. innovative breakthroughs in the 20th and early 21st century as well. Throughout these periods, litigation over the boundaries of patent rights played a central role in the sorting out of legal rights in new industries. Indeed, lawsuits went hand-in-hand with patent-enabled breakthroughs that allowed for the introduction and widespread adoption of new products that fundamentally transformed American industry (sewing machines in the 1800s; telephones, airplanes, and electrical equipment in the 1900s; and smartphones in the 2000s—just to name a few).3 Over the 1995–2015 period, patent licensing by academic and nonprofit institutions contributed $1.33 trillion to U.S. gross industry output; $591 billion to the gross domestic product; and supported 4,272,000 American jobs.4 While individual patents consistently have been the subject of legal disputes over time, patents as a whole have clearly been at the heart of successive waves of critically important American commercial innovation and continue to make enormous contributions to the American economy.

I. An Overview of Patents and Recent Court Decisions Affecting the U.S. Patent System5

New tools are urgently needed to restore the climate and repair the ocean, particularly carbon dioxide removal, including potential ocean-based pathways.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that large-scale carbon dioxide removal will be needed this century to hold temperatures to a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase — the goal set out in the Paris Agreement. And if we aspire to ultimately re-cool the planet, carbon dioxide removal is the only tool that can remove the legacy carbon dioxide pollution that otherwise will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

Out of the ashes of Clean Tech 1.0 emerged an evolved class of investors, armed with lessons learned and relevant operating expertise. Today, clean tech investors are supported by a network of climate tech peers across asset classes and investment stages; many are specialists who cut their teeth as investors or operators during Clean Tech 1.0. The field is not only dominated by venture capitalists providing catalytic capital to emerging technologies, but also encompasses growth equity investors with capital and expertise to scale commercially viable technologies, as well as real asset investors with the ability to deploy and use these technologies at scale in real world projects. Late-stage private equity managers are raising record capital with the ability to sustain the climate tech space beyond venture, unlike Clean Tech 1.0. In addition, sustainable infrastructure managers have ramped up to provide critical and compellingly structured capital for projects and companies that in Clean Tech 1.0 were otherwise funded by inexperienced venture capitalists. This league of climate tech investors provides an opportunity for asset owners to build a balanced portfolio of climate tech investments across stage and asset class.

From a sector expertise perspective, these Climate Tech 2.0 investors have taken a more measured approach to technology risk with more emphasis on software and optimization solutions, which are easier to scale and less capital intensive than hardware (e.g., carbon capture, fusion energy, hydrogen, etc.)—the primary focus of Clean Tech 1.0. While climate tech software presents competitive investment opportunities, hardware technologies are a crucial component in accelerating global decarbonization. Once de-risked, the surviving late-stage climate tech hardware companies face significant barriers to entry. Therefore, catalytic mission-aligned investors, as well as select sector specialists continue to fill the gaps by investing in necessary hardware technologies. In addition, strategic corporate investors are joining forces with traditional investment managers to invest in climate tech companies and add valuable technical and sector expertise as active board members as their own business models evolve with the energy transition.

Amid the torrent of bad news about climate change, a positive trend is emerging. Clean-tech companies are attracting unprecedented levels of funding, marking a paradigm shift within the investment landscape towards sustainability.

Innovative sustainable finance is playing a crucial role in supporting efforts to improve clean-energy access and to reduce carbon emissions. It often serves as a lifeline for developing nations, as governments from the developed world alone cannot raise sufficient funds to assist poorer nations as they grapple with a hotter planet and transition to renewable energy.

These innovations in what is being called “deep” or “hard” tech—products and processes based on science and engineering advances—could be critical in addressing climate change. While the past few years have seen remarkable progress in deploying relatively mature renewables such as solar and wind power, as well as strong growth in electric-vehicle sales, large gaps in the cleantech portfolio remain. In its most recent report this fall, the International Energy Agency estimates that around 35% of the emissions cuts needed to meet 2050 climate goals will have to come from technologies not yet available.

Key industrial sectors of the economy, in particular, have largely been untouched. Nearly a third of carbon emissions come from industrial processes used to make steel, cement, chemicals, and other commodities; concrete alone accounts for more than 7% of global emissions, while steel production is responsible for another 7% to 9%. Cleaning up these industries will take an almost unlimited supply of cheap, steady, and easily accessible carbon-free energy.

But difficulties still exist despite the amazing progress that has been made. Reluctance to change, low infrastructure, and large upfront expenditures are some of the obstacles preventing clean technology from being widely adopted. There is hope for overcoming these obstacles and advancing the clean technology revolution through the continued investigation of novel solutions, such as sophisticated energy storage technologies and the integration of renewable energy into current systems. As a result, the last ten years have seen revolutionary developments in clean technology (Hussain et al., 2022). These advancements, which range from green building techniques to waste management, transportation, and renewable energy, have pushed us closer to a more sustainable future. By accepting and expanding on these achievements, people can address climate change, reduce pollution, and create a cleaner, healthier, and more environmentally conscious world. In the following sections of this study, various advances in clean technology and how they affect environmental sustainability and global well-being are highlighted. The methodology that was used for the study consisted of conducting a systematic literature review, sourcing data from credible databases like PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, and using specific keywords related to clean technology advancements that have occurred over the course of the past ten years. The selection of empirical research and technology reports, with a particular emphasis on advancements in green building techniques, waste management, transportation, and renewable sources of energy, was secured by inclusion criteria. The categorization and analysis of detected breakthroughs were made easier with the help of data extraction and synthesis, and a comparison analysis provided insights into the relative impact of each of the advancements. A qualitative study was used to consider the opinions of the stakeholders, and an investigation into the policy and regulatory landscape was conducted to contextualise the advancements. This methodology as depicted in Fig. 1 recognises its own limits, but its overarching goal is to provide an exhaustive and nuanced investigation of the revolutionary developments in clean technology. Its hope is that this will inspire a drive toward a future that is more sustainable and ecologically sensitive.

Earlier today, I was sworn in by Chief Judge Kimberly A. Moore of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the new Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). I am both honored and excited to lead America’s Innovation Agency and to move our Country forward.

As Director, I want to begin a dialogue on steps we can take together to expand, protect, and commercialize U.S. innovation. Over the next few months, I plan to engage with and listen to as many stakeholders as I can. I want to hear from creators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and all those with big dreams from every walk of life, in every state and region—especially those who have historically lacked access to, and opportunities for equitable participation in, our intellectual property (IP) economy.

Last year, the USPTO received 40,000 patent applications in the clean technology sector which accounts for almost 7% of yearly patent applications. Inventors and companies at any tier can file a petition for the fast-track patent review. With this process, the USPTO hopes to see a rise in products and processes that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near future. The USPTO will accept petitions for this special status until June 5, 2023, or until 1,000 applications have been granted special status under this program.

The climate is rapidly deteriorating as companies begin committing to green energy initiatives. Clean technology is the future and will tangibly reduce the impacts of climate change.

[Seokbeom, February 2021, Science Direct, “The prevalence of weak patents in the United States: A new method to identify weak patents and the implications for patent policy”, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160791X20312720#:~:text=Issuing%20weak%20patents%20could%20also,from%20monopoly)%20%5B8%5D, Accessed July 10 2024, AMH]

Scholars suggest that the issuance of too many patents with dubious validity (hereafter, weak patents1) for a lack of novelty [5] and/or non-obviousness is one of the reasons. Testing novelty and non-obviousness is primarily based on the existing prior arts to the invention in question [6]. Therefore, failure to search and consider the complete set of prior arts leads to improper testing of the invention's novelty and non-obviousness, which eventually results in the issuance of weak patents and, consequentially, legal disputes over patent infringement or the validity of the patent claim [7]. Issuing weak patents could also be the subject of antitrust policy concern because imperfect patent examinations result in granting overly broad patent scopes, which may suppress market competition (i.e., social cost from monopoly) [8]. As a policy response, authorities attempt to implement various institutional measures to improve the quality of patent examination [9]. In the U.S., “improving the patent (legal) quality” has been a long-standing policy agenda [10,11]. Because patent examiners decide the patentability or validity of patents based on prior arts [[12], [13], [14], [15]], policy efforts have been focused on facilitating prior art searches in patent examinations.

[Michael D., Melissa F., Published July 2020 Revised May 2022, National Bureau of Economic Research, “INVESTING IN EX ANTE REULATION: EVIDENCE FROM PHARMACEUTICAL PATENT EXAMINATION”, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27579/w27579.pdf, Accessed July 09 2024, AMH] Our results suggest that time constraints facing U.S. patent examiners may be presently leading to the issuance of invalid secondary pharmaceutical patents that delay generic entry. We acknowledge, however, that these results do not immediately support the merits of increasing time allocations at the Patent Office. After all, among other considerations, time allocations will naturally entail greater expenditures and the federal courts nonetheless provide a backstop that may catch and correct the harms stemming from invalidly issued drug patents. In Part IV of this paper, we set forth a structure by which one might evaluate the welfare consequences of a reform that increased time allocations to review secondary drug patents. For those aspects of this exercise that we can estimate—e.g., the costs associated with expanding review, the downstream litigation expenses that may be saved as a result, and the static welfare gains that may arise from accelerated generic entry—our various back-of-the-envelope findings suggest that the gains from expanding ex ante review greatly outweigh the costs. However, a full accounting of the welfare gains that may ensue from such an investment remain an important task for future research given the need to better understand the welfare implications of the dynamic innovation responses that may result from the accelerated-generic-entry-induced reductions in market sizes.

Citing to specific lines for bases in the specification allows everyone to determine whether the newly claimed invention was originally contemplated by the inventors and provides more certainty for limited effort. We should not accept the argument that placing modest additional burdens on applicants in order to allow examiners to spend their limited time on more substantive and impactful tasks will make it too difficult to obtain patents. Enabling large companies to amass ever greater portfolios of low-quality patents on the cheap doesn’t serve the public interest or effectively incentivize innovation. Those whose business plans depend on enforceable rights should want fewer patents of higher quality and reliability.. And those inventors who can afford only one or two patents should prefer to invest a tiny bit more in prosecution to avoid wasting their scarce resources on an unsuccessful effort to enforce an invalid patent. This is one step towards better patent examination. I will be suggesting more!

A further criticism is from Ghosh and Kesan, correctly noting that Lemley overlooks the social benefits of valid patents and the social costs of invalid patents, which are multiprongedFootnote 153 and not as easy to ignore as Lemley claims. As an alternative, the authors propose “optimal ignorance,” which means “a patent agent acquires as much information as is necessary to ensure that socially desirable patents are granted.”Footnote 154 However, this alternative is self-contradictory and possibly even more controversial than rational ignorance. On the one hand, it admits that the USPTO faces physical constraints in time and costs as well as mental constraints such as bounded rationality.Footnote 155 On the other hand, it establishes the almost insurmountable task of ensuring that issued patents have a net positive social benefit,Footnote 156 without providing a clear test for evaluating the benefit of an individual patent to the whole society. Neither analyses nor data are provided to suggest that the intensive examination required by optimal ignorance can be achieved with limited resources. It seems that the acknowledgement of resource constraints does not preclude the authors from proposing a more resource-consuming solution.

One recommendation on how the Act could be improved would be to have GAO evaluate if Congress should increase the USPTO’s budget. The USPTO relies on fees generated by patent applications and patent maintenance to fund itself, leading some studies to question whether this gives the USPTO an incentive to grant more patents than it should. Increasing the USPTO’s budget could also allow them to hire more patent examiners. As of October 2022, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners but had a backlog of over 700,000 patent applications waiting to be examined. Adding more examination time and matching applications with examiners based on expertise may not help if the supply of examiners is not close to meeting the demand of patent applications. If the USPTO is focused on reducing its backlog, then the 8,000 current patent examiners will never have enough time to thoroughly examine a patent application and the approval of low-quality patents will continue.

With the few exceptions noted above, we reproduced the data from the XML files in their entirety, making no attempt to correct errors. Because the USPTO does not validate the accuracy of information recorded, such errors and inaccuracies are expected. Regrettably, we are unable to conduct a large-scale, retrospective validation to determine the extent to which data errors may be non-random. Moreover, substantial portions of these data are not regularized, especially in the assignor and assignee name and address fields. Wanting to provide researchers maximal flexibility in employing these data, we opted to retain the original free-form text throughout the Dataset.

Serrano (2010) provides a thorough discussion of the general limitations of patent assignment data, namely that these data do not distinguish the acquisition of a firm from the acquisition of a bundle of patents. Further they cannot distinguish parties’ intended purpose in transacting (for instance, between assignments intended to facilitate technology adoption versus those made by licensing entities interested only in monetizing the patent). Moreover, patent assignment records provide no information on the price paid for assigned patents. For these reasons, we encourage researchers to link the Dataset to other data sources to further study these transactions within the market for technology.

The volume and rapid increase of continuing applications negatively impacts the USPTO's workload and docketing practices. For example, it is difficult for the agency to balance patent resources between the examination of ``new'' (i.e., noncontinuing) applications disclosing new technology and innovations, and continuing applications, which, in some cases, are a repetition of previously examined applications either issued as patents or that have become abandoned. See e.g., FY 2021 pendency statistics review presented at the PPAC quarterly meeting on Nov. 18, 2021, available on the USPTO website at https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/20211115-PPAC-FY21-pendency-stats-review.pdf (note that about 80% of continuations have a patented parent).

[Leslie A, 5-8-2024, Skadden, “USPTO Provides Guidance on Using AI-Based Tools in Filing and Preparing Patent and Trademark Applications,” , accessed 7-9-2024, CM]

In this guidance, the USPTO acknowledges that the recent proliferation of AI-based tools can be beneficial to legal professionals and others that practice before the USPTO. However, it also focuses on the risks posed by overreliance on AI (such as, outputs with critical misstatements or omissions, or legal briefs with fictionalized citations and quotations) as well as those that can arise from sharing sensitive or confidential client information with AI-platforms, stressing the importance for practitioners using AI to ensure they are compliant with the Office’s standards and expectations. Practitioners must make sure to carefully review any work created with the assistance of AI and ensure that their use complies with their preexisting duties and obligations before the Office.

[Minesoft is a patent solutions provider to Fortune 500, IP specialists, and patent attorneys, 2024, “The challenges to patentability posed by Artificial Intelligence,” ., accessed 7-9-2024, CM]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way in recent years and has become an increasingly important part of many industries, including the legal and patent industries. However, with the rapid advancement of AI technology, comes new challenges to the patentability of innovations generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Anticipation is high with the patent community for the forthcoming rulings from the USPTO concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and inventorship. My crystal ball projections for 2024 are that the USPTO will rule as follows:

Existing law dictates that only natural persons can be designated as inventors.