PTAB litigation is letting China lead in tech race
Paul Morinville and Molly Metz, 2-19-2024. Paul Morinville is Executive Director/Founder at US Inventor. Molly Metz, a former five-time world jump rope champion, has been involved in the sport of jump rope for over 40 years. Her various offerings to the sport range from competitor, coach, innovator, and Founder/Owner of JumpNrope manufacturing, and she has served on numerous jump rope boards both in the US and abroad. "Hopelessly Inexperienced PTAB Judges are Destroying U.S. Innovation", Innovation Gadfly - Bite the Beast Until it Moves, https://innovationgadfly.com/hopelessly-inexperienced-ptab-judges-are-destroying-u-s-innovation/
In 91.8% of petitions, PTAB management did not assign three APJs with the correct educational background and experience to panels. That is an incredible number and shows that the PTAB has no expertise at all, let alone the agency expertise of the USPTO. Matal’s testimony is nonsense. The agency expertise he attempts to apply to the PTAB is exclusive to the USPTO patent examiner corps.
If Not The PTAB, Who?
For over 220 years, patent validity challenges were handled in the federal courts. It worked quite well, driving the U.S. to lead the world in every technology revolution, from potash processing to smartphones. Since the creation of the PTAB, the U.S. no longer leads – China does.
Very few federal court judges have experience in any technology, let alone whatever comes into their court in a patent trial. To make up for that deficiency (among others), the federal courts created the role of Special Master.
Special Masters work for the court and, in patent cases, are selected because they have experience and education specific to the patented technology being adjudicated. The parties pay for the Special Master, so there is no burden on the court or on taxpayers. Each party proffers its own technical expert testimony. The Special Master ensures that the court understands the technology and the expert arguments. Thus, Special Masters enable the court to obtain expertise akin to USPTO agency expertise.
Matal’s assertion that the courts do not have agency expertise is a farse, and his misattribution of USPTO agency expertise to the PTAB has resulted in thousands of US patents being unjustly invalidated thereby sending countless inventors to ruin, along with U.S. innovation in general.
The PTAB has shown it is utterly incapable of properly adjudicating the validity of patents and that incompetence damages our economic growth and national security. It is time to accept that we made a very bad mistake creating the PTAB and abolish it.