Advice about the patent bar for current and prospective law students

Guest post by Professor Eric E. Johnson (ericejohnson.com)

I recently asked fellow intellectual property professors and others about advice for law students interested in taking the patent bar. The IP community generously responded, and I have synthesized their wisdom and opinions here, with some of my own advice sprinkled in. Of course, opinions differ and things change, so students should consider this post as a jumping-off point for doing their own research and asking their own questions.

Pushback on Decreasing Patent Quality Narrative

It's been a while since I've posted, as I've taken on Vice Dean duties at my law school that have kept me busy. I hope to blog more regularly as I get my legs under me. But I did see a paper worth posting mid-summer.

Wasserman & Frakes have published several papers showing that as examiners gain more seniority, their time spent examining patents decreases and their allowances come more quickly. They (and many others) have taken this to mean a decrease in patent quality.

Charles A. W. deGrazia (University of London, USPTO), Nicholas A. Pairolero (USPTO), and Mike H. M. Teodorescu (Boston College Management, Harvard Business) have released a draft that pushes back on this narrative. The draft is available on SSRN, and the abstract is below:

Prior research argues that USPTO first-action allowance rates increase with examiner seniority and experience, suggesting lower patent quality. However, we show that the increased use of examiner's amendments account for this prior empirical finding. Further, the mechanism reduces patent pendency by up to fifty percent while having no impact on patent quality, and therefore likely benefits innovators and firms. Our analysis suggests that the policy prescriptions in the literature regarding modifying examiner time allocations should be reconsidered. In particular, rather than re-configuring time allocations for every examination promotion level, researchers and stakeholders should focus on the variation in outcomes between junior and senior examiners and on increasing training for examiner's amendment use as a solution for patent grant delay.

In short, they hypothesize (and then empirically show with 4.6 million applications) that as seniority increases, the likelihood of examiner amendments goes up, and it goes up on the first office action. They measure how different the amended claims are, and they use measures of patent scope to show that the amended applications are no broader than those that junior examiners take longer to prosecute.

Their conclusion is that to the extent seniority leads to a time crunch through heavier loads, it is handled by more efficient claim amendment through the examiner amendment procedures, and quality is not reduced.

As with all new studies like this one, it will take time to parse out the methodology and hear critiques. I, for one, am glad to hear of rising use of examiner amendments, as I long ago suggested that as a way to improve patent clarity.

Freilich & Ouellette: USPTO should require prophetic examples to be clearly labeled to avoid confusion

Professor Janet Freilich (Fordham Law) has a fantastic forthcoming law review article, Prophetic Patents, which puts a spotlight on the common practice of submitting patent applications containing entirely hypothetical experimental results. These "prophetic examples" are permitted as long as the predicted results are not in the past tense. Using this tense rule, Freilich analyzed over two million U.S. patents in chemistry and biology, and she estimates that 17% of examples in these patents are prophetic. Prophetic examples may be familiar to patent drafters, but scientists and engineers who learn about them generally describe them as bizarre, and even some patent scholars are unfamiliar with the practice. Prophetic Patents was the one article by a lawyer selected for the 2018 NBER Summer Institute on Innovation, and the economist-heavy audience was fascinated by the concept—many were not even aware that researchers can obtain a patent without actually implementing an invention, much less that patents can contain hypothetical data.

Freilich notes the potential benefits of allowing untested ideas to be patented in terms of encouraging earlier disclosure and helping firms acquire financing, though she finds that patents with prophetic examples are not broader (based on claim word count), filed earlier (based on AIA implementation), or more likely to be filed by small entities. I'm very sympathetic to the argument that the current legal standard may allow speculative ideas to be patented too early—I've argued in prior work that all the competing policy considerations raised by Pierson v. Post about the optimal timing of property rights suggest that many patents are currently awarded prematurely. This is a challenging empirical question, however, because we cannot observe the counterfactual innovation ecosystem operating under a different legal standard.

But while pondering the hard question of the timing of patentability, patent scholars should not lose sight of the easy question: even if patenting untested inventions is socially desirable, there is no reason these patents need to be confusing. To me, Freilich's most interesting empirical result is her study of how often prophetic patents are mis-cited in scientific publications. She looked at 100 randomly selected patents with only prophetic examples that were cited in a scientific article or book for a specific proposition, and she found that 99 were not cited in a way that made clear they were prophetic. Instead, they were cited with phrases such as "[d]ehydration reaction in gas phase has been carried out over solid acid catalysts" (emphasis added). And it is not surprising that scientist readers are misled: many prophetic examples do confusingly mimic actual experiments, with specific numerical results. In prior work, I have shown that contrary to the assertions of some patent scholars, a substantial number of scientists do look to the patent literature to learn new technical information. So it is concerning that a large number of patents are written in a way that can be confusing to readers unfamiliar with the tense rule.

Freilich and I teamed up on a new project for which we interviewed patent drafters to explore whether prophetic examples have any important benefits for patentees that could not be obtained through less misleading methods of constructive reduction to practice. In Science Fiction: Fictitious Experiments in Patents—just published in last week's Science—we explain that the answer is no. Patent prosecutors who rarely use prophetic examples argued that there is no legal reason to use fictitious experiments with specific results rather than more general predictions. Those who usually use prophetic examples agreed that more explicit labeling would not affect the patents' legal strength. The only benefit to patentees that would be reduced by requiring greater clarity seems to be any benefit that comes from confusion, which does not seem worth preserving.

The USPTO already requires prophetic examples to be labeled by tense. But the tense rule is unfamiliar to many readers (including scientists and investors), and the distinction in tenses may be literally lost in translation in foreign patent offices. (For example, the form of Chinese verbs does not change with tense.) There is no good justification for not having a more explicit label, such as "hypothetical experiment." As Freilich and I conclude: "Just because some patents are not based on actual results does not mean they need to be confusing. Scientists regularly write grant applications in a way that makes clear what preliminary data they have already acquired and what the expected goal of the proposed project is. Perhaps this is an area in which the patent system could learn from the scientific community."

Jotwell Review of Frakes & Wasserman's Irrational Ignorance at the Patent Office

I've previously recommended subscribing to Jotwell to keep up with interesting recent IP scholarship, but for anyone who doesn't, my latest Jotwell post highlighted a terrific forthcoming article by Michael Frakes and Melissa Wasserman. Here are the first two paragraphs:

How much time should the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) spend evaluating a patent application? Patent examination is a massive business: the USPTO employs about 8,000 utility patent examiners who receive around 600,000 patent applications and approve around 300,000 patents each year. Examiners spend on average only 19 total hours throughout the prosecution of each application, including reading voluminous materials submitted by the applicant, searching for relevant prior art, writing rejections, and responding to multiple rounds of arguments from the applicant. Why not give examiners enough time for a more careful review with less likelihood of making a mistake?

In a highly-cited 2001 article, Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office, Mark Lemley argued that it doesn’t make sense to invest more resources in examination: since only a minority of patents are licensed or litigated, thorough scrutiny should be saved for only those patents that turn out to be valuable. Lemley identified the key tradeoffs, but had only rough guesses for some of the relevant parameters. A fascinating new article suggests that some of those approximations were wrong. In Irrational Ignorance at the Patent Office, Michael Frakes and Melissa Wasserman draw on their extensive empirical research with application-level USPTO data to conclude that giving examiners more time likely would be cost-justified. To allow comparison with Lemley, they focused on doubling examination time. They estimated that this extra effort would cost $660 million per year (paid for by user fees), but would save over $900 million just from reduced patent prosecution and litigation costs.

Read more at Jotwell.

Does Administrative Patent Law Promote Innovation About Innovation?

I am at Texas Law today for a symposium on The Intersection of Administrative & IP Law, and my panel was asked to address the question: Does Administrative Patent Law Promote Innovation? I focused my remarks on a specific aspect of this: Does Administrative Patent Law Promote Innovation About Innovation? I think the short answer, at least right now, is "no."

There is a lot we don't know about the patent system. USPTO Regional Director Hope Shimabuku started her remarks today by saying that we know IP creates nearly 30 million jobs and adds $6.6 trillion to the U.S. economy each year, citing this USPTO report. But that's not what the report says. It looks at jobs and value from "IP-intensive industries," defined as ones with "IP-count to employment ratio is higher than the average for all industries considered." As the report acknowledges, it is unable to determine how much of these firms' performance is attributable to IP.

And the real answer is: we don't know. In an article I reviewed for Jotwell, economist Heidi Williams recently summarized: "we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights—either longer patent terms or broader patent rights—encourage research investments." And even on smaller questions, the existing evidence base is weak.

As I explained in Patent Experimentalism, to make empirical progress we need some source of empirical variation. Economists often look for "natural experiments" with variation across time, across jurisdictions, or across similar technologies, and the closer that variation is to random, the easier it is to draw causal inferences. Of course, it's even better to have variation that is actually random, which is why I have joined other scholars in arguing for more use of randomized policy experiments.

The USPTO has a huge opportunity here to both improve the patent system and help address the key administrative law challenge of encouraging accurate and consistent decisions by a decentralized bureaucracy. There are many questions the agency could help answer using more randomization, as I discuss in Patent Experimentalism. During the panel today, I noted two potential areas: experimenting with the time spent examining a given patent (see this great forthcoming article by Michel Frakes and Melissa Wasserman) and with the possibility that examiner bias affects the gender gap in patenting (which fits within the agency's recent mandate from Congress). I noted ways that each could be designed as opt-in progress to encourage buy-in from applicants and from examiners.

But my main point was not that the USPTO should adopt one of these particular experiments—it was that the agency should study something in a way that allows us to draw rigorous inferences. Failing to do so seems like a tremendous missed opportunity.

Judging Patents by their Rejection Use

The quest for an objective measure of patent quality continues. Scholars have attempted many, many ways to calculate such value, including citations, maintenance fee payments, number of claims, length of claims, and so forth. As each new data source has become available, more creative ways of measuring value have been developed (and old ways of measuring value have been validated/questioned).

Today, I'd like to briefly introduce a new one: the use of patents rejecting other patents. Chris Cotropia (Richmond) and David Schwartz (Northwestern) have posted a short essay on SSRN introducing their methodology.* The abstract for the cleverly named Patents Used in Patent Office Rejections as Indicators of Value is here:

The economic literature emphasizes the importance of patent citations, particularly forward citations, as an indicator of a cited patent’s value. Studies have refined which forward citations are better indicators of value, focusing on examiner citations for example. We test a metric that arguably is closer tied to private value—the substantive use of a patent by an examiner in a patent office rejection of another pending patent application. This paper assesses how patents used in 102 and 103 rejections relate to common measures of private value—specifically patent renewal, the assertion of a patent in litigation, and the number of patent claims. We examine rejection data from U.S. patent applications pending from 2008 to 2017 and then link value data to rejection citations to patents issued from 1999 to 2007. Our findings show that rejection patents are independently, positively correlated with many of the value measurements above and beyond forward citations and examiner citations.

The essay is a short, easy read, and I recommend it. They examine nearly 700,000 patents used in anticipation and obviousness rejections and find that not all patent citations are equal, and that those citations that were used in a rejection have additional ability to explain value, even when other predictors, such as forward citations and examiner citations are included in the model. The only value measure that had no statistically significant relationship to rejection patents was use in litigation (even though forward citations did). This may say something about the types of patents that are litigated or about the role of rejection patents in litigation.

That's about all I'll say about this essay. The paper is a brief introduction to the way this new data set might be used, and this blog post is a brief introduction to the paper.

*At least, I think it's theirs. If you know of an earlier article that measures this on any kind of scale, please let me know!

Measuring Alice's Effect on Patent Prosecution

It's a bit weird to write a blog post about something posted at another blog in order to bring attention to it, when that blog has many more readers than this blog. Nonetheless, I thought that the short essay Decoding Patentable Subject Matter by Colleen Chien (Santa Clara) and her student Jiun Ying Wu, in the Patently-O Law Journal was worth a mention. The article is also on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

The Supreme Court’s patentable subject matter jurisprudence from 2011 to 2014 has raised significant policy concerns within the patent community. Prominent groups within the IP community and academia, and commentators to the 2017 USPTO Patentable Subject Matter report have called for an overhaul of the Supreme Court’s “two-step test.” Based on an analysis of 4.4 million office actions mailed from 2008 through mid-July 2017 covering 2.2 million unique patent applications, this article uses a novel technology identification strategy and a differences-in-differences approach to document a spike in 101 rejections among select medical diagnostics and software/business method applications following the Alice and Mayo decisions. Within impacted classes of TC3600 (“36BM”), the 101 rejection rate grew from 25% to 81% in the month after the Alice decision, and has remained above 75% almost every month through the last month of available data (2/2017); among abandoned applications, the prevalence of 101 rejection subject matter rejections in the last office action was around 85%. Among medical diagnostic (“MedDx”) applications, the 101 rejection rate grew from 7% to 32% in the month after the Mayo decision and continued to climb to a high of 64% and to 78% among final office actions just prior to abandonment. In the month of the last available data (from early 2017), the prevalence of subject matter 101 rejections among all office actions in applications in this field was 52% and among office actions before abandonment, was 62%. However outside of impacted areas, the footprint of 101 remained small, appearing in under 15% of all office actions. A subsequent piece will consider additional data and implications for policy.

This article is the first in a series of pieces appearing in Patently-O based on insights gleaned from the release of the treasure trove of open patent data starting the USPTO from 2012.

The essay is a short, easy read, and the graphs really tell you all you need to know from a differences-in-differences point of view - there was a huge spike in medical diagnostics rejections following Mayo and software & business patent rejections following Alice. We already knew this from the Bilski Blog, but this is comprehensive. Interesting to me from a legal history/political economy standpoint is the fact that software rejections were actually trending downward after Mayo but before Alice. I've always thought that was odd. The Mayo test, much as I dislike it, easily fits with abstract ideas in the same way it fits with natural phenomena. Why courts and the PTO simply did not make that leap until Alice has always been a great mystery to me.

Another important finding is that 101 apparently hasn't destroyed any other tech areas the way it has software and diagnostics. Even so, 10% to 15% rejections in other areas is a whole lot more than there used to be. Using WIPO technical classifications shows that most areas have been touched somehow.

Another takeaway is that the data used came from Google BigQuery, which is really great to see. I blogged about this some time ago and I'm glad to see it in use.

So, this was a good essay, and the authors note it is the first in a series. In that spirit, I have some comments for future expansion:

1. The authors mention the "two-step" test many times, but provide no data about the two steps. If the data is in the office action database, I'd love to see which step is the important one. My gut says we don't see a lot of step two determinations.

2. The authors address gaming the claims to avoid certain tech classes, but discount this by showing growth in the business methods class. However, the data they use is office action rejections, which is lagged--sometimes by years. I think an interesting analysis would be office action rejections by date of patent filing, both earliest priority and by the date the particular claim was added. This would show growth or decline in those classes, as well as whether the "101 problem" is limited to older patents.

3. All of the graphs start in the post-Bilski (Fed. Cir.) world. The office actions date back to 2008. I'd like to see what happened between 2008 and 2010.

4. I have no sense of scale. The essay discusses 2000 rejections per month, and it discusses in terms of rates, but I'd like to know, for example, a) what percentage of applications are in the troubled classes? b) how many applications are in the troubled classes (and others)? c) etc.? In other words, is this devastation of a few or of many?

5. Are there any subclasses in the troubled centers that have a better survival rate? The appendix shows the high rejection classes, what about the low rejection classes (if any)?

I look forward to future work on this!

How will the USPTO study gaps in patenting by women, minorities, and veterans under the new SUCCESS Act?

On Wednesday, President Trump signed H.R. 6758, the Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success Act of 2018 (SUCCESS Act). It states that the "sense of Congress" is that the United States should "close the gap in the number of patents applied for and obtained by women and minorities to harness the maximum innovative potential and continue to promote United States leadership in the global economy."

The USPTO has been charged with conducting a study that "(1) identifies publicly available data on the number of patents annually applied for and obtained by, and the benefits of increasing the number of patents applied for and obtained by women, minorities, and veterans and small businesses owned by women, minorities, and veterans; and (2) provides legislative recommendations for how to— (A) promote the participation of women, minorities, and veterans in entrepreneurship activities; and (B) increase the number of women, minorities, and veterans who apply for and obtain patents." Congress wants to receive a report on the study results within a year.

There is already great empirical work on gender and racial gaps in patenting, including the "lost Einsteins" work by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen and Colleen Chien's Inequality, Innovation, and Patents. The USPTO could expand on this work, including by adding to its excellent collection of research datasets. Accurately quantifying the net benefits of increasing patenting by certain groups will be more difficult—especially if the agency follows Jonathan Masur's suggestions for improving its economic analysis—though the second half of the study doesn't depend on getting this number right.

The second half of the study—recommending how to promote entrepreneurship and patenting by women, minorities, and veterans—will require the USPTO to master a different strand of the empirical literature. I've spent some time digging into this work for my upcoming discussion group on Innovation and Inequality, and suffice it to say that there is robust debate about why certain groups are underrepresented in science, engineering, entrepreneurship, and patenting. (Though I haven't seen anything focused on veterans.) There's also increasing academic interest in these issues. For example, at the new Cardozo-Google Project for Patent Diversity, the goal is "to increase the number of U.S. patents issued to women and minorities," mostly by matching resource-constrained inventors with pro bono patent attorneys.

The USPTO is well positioned to bring new evidence to this debate, and I hope it will take this study as an opportunity to test some proposals in rigorous ways through actual field experiments. The agency has shown a wonderful willingness to experiment with pilot programs, but it could learn far more by, for example, randomly selecting only a subset of those opting in to the pilot and comparing their outcomes to those who opted in but weren't selected. (For a review of the literature on learning through policy randomization and some potential applications in patent law, see Part II of my Patent Experimentalism.) Such experimentation could be useful even for small questions, such as whether acceleration certificates (like those used as Patents for Humanity prizes) are useful at increasing pro bono volunteer work among the patent bar.

The SUCCESS Act seems like an exciting chance for the USPTO, and potentially for academics the agency collaborates with, so I look forward to seeing how they use this opportunity.

Measuring the Role of Attorney Quality in Patenting

It stands to reason that better attorneys are better at turning patent applications into patents. Theoretically, better arguments about overcoming prior art, for example, will be more likely to lead to granted claims. But what about the quality of inventions? Maybe better patent attorneys just get better patent applications, so of course they have better success rates.

Measuring this is hard, but Gaétan de Rassenfosse (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and four co-authors from University of Melbourne and Swinburne University of Technology think they have found the answer. Examining 1.2 million granted and refused patent applications in the US, Europe (EPO), China, Japan, and South Korea, they think they have the answer. They have posted a draft on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

Failure to obtain a patent weakens the market position and production chain of enterprises in patent-intensive technology domains. For such enterprises, finding ways to maximise the chance to obtain patent protection is a business imperative. Using information from patent applications filed in at least two of the five largest patent offices in the world between 2000 and 2006, we find that the ability to obtain patent protection depends not only on the quality of the invention but also on the quality of the patent attorney. In some cases, the latter is surprisingly more important than the former. We also find that having a high-quality patent attorney increases the chance of getting a patent in less codified technology areas such as software and ICT.

They use a clever approach with their multi-country methodology to separate attorney quality from invention quality. By estimating grant rates across countries for the same inventions as well as for the same attorneys, they are able to estimate the marginal value added by the invention versus the attorney. For example, if different attorneys have differing results in two countries with the same invention, then attorney quality is likely at play. However, if the same attorney has differing results in two countries with the same invention, then invention quality is more likely at issue. Of course, this doesn't work with a couple of patents, but with more than one million patent applications, the estimates likely trend toward a reasonable measure of each type of quality unaffected by the other.

Using this index of quality, they then estimate the effects of attorney and invention quality. They find that, as expected, invention quality matters. But they also find that attorney quality matters--sometimes a lot. More interesting, they find that attorney quality matters more where there is more wiggle room (my term, not theirs), such as in software (as opposed to chemistry). In other words, they find empirical evidence to support the intuition that attorneys who can mold claims to avoid rejections are more likely to wind up with issued patents.

Now, the benefit isn't unbounded. Because grant rates are really high (like 85%), the marginal benefit is unlikely to be huge. One marginal estimate they make is that moving from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile in quality increases the grant probability by 13 percentage points (e.g, from 79% to 92%). What this means is that invention quality is very important, because even the least successful attorneys are successful most of the time. Of course, this is a potential criticism, because if everything is granted, then how can we measure quality based on grant rates? The paper addresses this, arguing that there is a lot of variability, even within the same patent family. They also test on other measures of patent quality and find similar results.

The authors also make other interesting findings: external counsel increase grant rates, attorney quality doesn't seem to have an effect on foreign v. local probabilities, and attorney quality is of less importance in PCT applications. There is a lot more to the paper - including effects in different offices, on different technologies and other great information. I found this to be a really interesting and useful read.

Patents and the Administrative State

When Justice Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, many commentators, well, commented that he was wary of administrative overreach. But it turns out he was really active in patent cases, writing opinions in all the patent cases he saw last term. Who knew he was so interested in patents? He does have some IP chops; his opinion in Meshworks remains one of my favorite copyright cases, not the least of which because it validates a legal argument I made about virtual reality copyright some 25 years ago. I was able to cite that case in a recent book chapter on the same subject.

But it turns out that his interest in patents may be one and the same as his concern about the administrative state. We suspected as much with Oil States, but what about the others? To answer this, Daniel Kim and Jonathan Stroud (both of Unified Patents) have an article forthcoming in the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property called Administrative Oversight: Justice Gorsuch’s Patent Opinions, the PTAB, and Antagonism Toward the Administrative State. A draft is posted on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

In his first term, Justice Neil Gorsuch has made a surprisingly forceful impact on, of all things, patent law—and even more unlikely, the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s adjudicatory arm, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Was there any way to predict, from his 10th Circuit opinions below, that he would author opinions in all three patent cases in his first term? Was this attention the result of deeply submerged but long-felt opinions on patent law, or rather a result of his sharp distrust of administrative overreach? We analyze 10th Circuit and Supreme Court opinions authored by Justice Gorsuch, and conclude his unforeseen interest springs from his desire to limit agency power rather than from any particular concern with patents. Still, his opinions—intentionally or by happenstance—will reverberate through our patent law for years.

This article is straightforward and illuminating. It begins with the justice's background and some comments on his writing style. It then examines his Tenth Circuit opinions in IP and tribal immunity (there are really not that many, which the authors attribute to the backwater location of the 10th Circuit devoid of any innovation, which I'm sure the folks in Denver will be happy to hear).

What's interesting about the article is that its analysis of the cases is not about IP outcomes, but about methods and the administrative state. Returning to Meshwerks, for example, the authors focus primarily on how it traces the history and purpose of IP rather than the important holding that realistic renditions of physical objects lack creativity.

This analysis bears fruit, though, because they show how these same methods and concerns about the administrative state drive Gorsuch's patent opinions, including those where he is dissenting or breaking from other conservative justices.

I found this article an interesting and insightful read, and I thought it was especially well done given the authors' own admission that they do not agree with Justice Gorsuch's judicial perspective. In other words, this wasn't a fan piece, but instead really useful commentary about how judicial philosophy and concerns about the administrative state may be brought to bear on the IP system in unexpected ways.

Questioning Design Patent Bar Restrictions

Every once in a while an article comes along that makes you realize all the things that you just don't realize. Of course, someone else realizes these things, which makes you realize all the things you should be realizing but didn't. But this is what scholarship is about, I think - spreading knowledge. The latest such article for me is The Design Patent Bar: An Occupational Licensing Failure, by Chris Buccafusco and Jeanne Curtis (both of Cardozo Law). A draft is posted on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

Although any attorney can represent clients with complex property, tax, or administrative issues, only a certain class of attorneys can assist with obtaining and challenging patents before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO). Only those who are members of the PTO’s patent bar can prosecute patents, and eligibility for the patent bar is only available to people with substantial scientific or engineering credentials. However much sense the eligibility rules make for utility patents—those based on novel scientific or technical inventions—they are completely irrational when applied to design patents—those based on ornamental or aesthetic industrial designs. Yet the PTO applies its eligibility rules to both kinds of patents. While chemical engineers can prosecute both utility patents and design patents (and in any field), industrial designers cannot even prosecute design patents. This Article applies contemporary research in the law and economics of occupational licensing to demonstrate how the PTO’s application of eligibility rules to design patents harms the patent system by increasing the costs of obtaining and challenging design patents. Moreover, we argue that the PTO’s rules produce a substantial disparate impact on women’s access to a lucrative part of the legal profession. By limiting design patent prosecution jobs to those with science and engineering credentials, the majority of whom are men, the PTO’s rules disadvantage women attorneys. We conclude by offering two proposals for addressing the harms caused by the current system.

It never occurred to me to think about the qualifications required for prosecuting design patents. The observation that a different set of skills goes into such work is a good one; it makes no sense that a chemistry grad can prosecute design patents but an industrial design grad cannot. There are plenty of outstanding trademark lawyers who could probably do this work, despite not having a science or engineering degree.

I like that this paper takes the issue beyond this simple observation (which could really be a blog post or op-ed), and applies some occupational licensing concepts to the issue. Furthermore, I like that the paper makes some testable assertions that can drive future scholarship, such as whether these rules have a disparate impact on women. I am skeptical about the negative impact on design patents, but I think that's testable as well.

The paper concludes with some relatively mild suggestions on how to open up the field a little bit. I think they should be considered, but I'm happy to hear from folks who disagree.

USPTO Director Iancu Proposes Revised 101 Guidance

In remarks at the annual IPO meeting today, USPTO Director Andrei Iancu said "the USPTO cannot wait" for "uncertain" legislation on patentable subject matter and is "contemplating revised guidance" to help examiners apply this doctrine. Few are likely to object to his general goal of "increased clarity," but the USPTO should be sure that any new guidance is consistent with precedent from the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit.

As most readers of this blog are well aware, the Supreme Court's recent patentable-subject-matter cases—Bilski (2010), Mayo (2012), Myriad (2013), and Alice (2014)—have made it far easier to invalidate patent claims that fall under the "implicit exception" to § 101 for "laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas." Since Alice, the Federal Circuit has held patents challenged on patentable-subject-matter grounds to be invalid in over 90% of appeals, and the court has struggled to provide clear guidance on the contours of the doctrine. Proponents of this shift call it a necessary tool in the fight against "patent trolls"; critics claim it creates needless uncertainty in patent rights and makes it too difficult to patent important innovations in areas such as medical diagnostics. In June, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced the Restoring America’s Leadership in Innovation Act of 2018, which would amend § 101 to largely undo these changes—following a joint proposal of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) and Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO)—but Govtrack gives it a 2% chance of being enacted and Patently-O says 0%.

In the absence of legislation, can the USPTO step in? In his IPO speech today, Director Iancu decries "recent § 101 case law" for "mush[ing]" patentable subject matter with the other patentability criteria under §§ 102, 103, and 112, and he proposes new guidance for patent examiners because this mushing "must end." The problem is that the USPTO cannot overrule recent § 101 case law. It does not have rulemaking authority over substantive patent law criteria, so it must follow Federal Circuit and Supreme Court guidance on this doctrine, mushy though it might be.

Evidence on Patent Disclosure via Depository Libraries

When I first started practice, the place to go for patents was the Patent Depository Library at the Sunnyvale Public Library. Not only did they have copies of all the patents, they had other disclosures, like the IBM Technical Disclosure series. For those who wonder whether people actually read patents, I can attest that I never went to that library and found it empty. Many people, mostly individual inventors who did not want to pay for Delphion or some other electronic service, went there to look at the prior art. Sadly, the library ceased to be at the end of 2017. Widespread free availability on the Internet, plus a new USPTO center in San Jose siphoned off all the traffic.

Rather than rely on my anecdotal evidence, a new NBER paper examines the role of Patent Depository Libraries as evidence of patent disclosure. Jeffrey Furman (Boston U. Strategy & Policy Dept), Markus Nagler, and Martin Watzinger (both of Ludwig Maximillian U. in Munich) have posted Disclosure and Subsequent Innovation: Evidence from the Patent Depository Library Program to NBER's website (sorry, it's a paywall unless you've got .gov or .edu rights). The abstract is here:

How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? Although disclosure is regarded as essential to the functioning of the patent system, legal scholars have expressed considerable skepticism about its value in practice. To adjudicate this issue, we examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent and Trademark Depository Library system between 1975 to 1997. Whereas the exclusion rights associated with patents are national in scope, the opening of these patent libraries during the pre-Internet era yielded regional variation in the costs to access the technical information (prior art) disclosed in patent documents. We find that after a patent library opens, local patenting increases by 17% relative to control regions that have Federal Depository Libraries. A number of additional analyses suggest that the disclosure of technical information in the patent documents is the mechanism underlying this boost in patenting: the response to patent libraries is significant and of important magnitude among young companies, library opening induces local inventors to cite more geographically distant and more technologically diverse prior art, and the library boost ceases to be present after the introduction of the Internet. We find that library opening is also associated with an increase in local business formation and job creation, which suggests that the impact of libraries is not limited to patenting outcomes. Taken together, our analyses provide evidence that the information disclosed in patent prior art plays an important role in supporting cumulative innovation.

 The crux of the study is the match to other, similar areas with Federal Depository (but not patent) Libraries. The authors acknowledge that the opening of a patent library might well be a leading indicator of expected future patenting, but the authors discount this by arguing that the Patent Libraries would have had to somehow predict the exact year of increased patenting, and then apply in advance of that date and get approved just in time. The odds of this seem low, especially when the results are localized to within 15 miles of the library (and no further).

The first core finding, that patenting increased, is ambiguous normatively. The authors discuss enhanced innovation, but equally likely alternatives are that people just got excited about patenting or that innovation already occurring was more easily patented. That said, they find the same quality, which implies that the patenting wasn't simply frivolous.

The second finding is more important: that the types of citations and disclosures changed (and that those changes disappeared when patents were more readily available on the Internet). This finding implies that somebody was reading these patents. The question is who. A followup study looking at how the makeup of inventorship changed would be interesting. Were the additional grants solo inventors or large companies? Who used these libraries?

Even without answering this question, this study was both useful and interesting, as well as a bit nostalgic.

Measuring Patent Thickets

Those interested in the patent system have long complained of patent thickets as a barrier to efficient production of new products and services. The more patents in an area, the argument goes, the harder it is to enter. There are several studies that attempt to measure the effect of patent thickets, with some studies arguing that thickets can ease private ordering. I'd like to briefly point out another (new) one. Charles deGrazia (U. London, Royal Holloway College), Jesse Frumkin, Nicholas Pairolero (both of USPTO) have posted a new draft on SSRN, called Embracing Technological Similarity for the Measurement of Complexity and Patent Thickets. Here is the abstract:

Clear and well-defi ned patent rights can incentivize innovation by granting monopoly rights to the inventor for a limited period of time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention. However, when a product draws from intellectual property held across multiple firms (including fragmented intellectual property or patent thickets), contracting failures may lead to suboptimal economic outcomes (Shapiro 2000). Researchers have developed several measures to gauge the extent and impact of patent thickets. This paper contributes to that literature by proposing a new measure of patent thickets that incorporates patent claim similarity to more precisely identify technological similarity, which is shown to increase the information contained in the measurement of patent thickets. Further, the measure is universally computable for all patent systems. These advantages will enable more accurate measurement and allow for novel economic research on technological complexity, fragmentation in intellectual property, and patent thickets within and across all patent jurisdictions.

 The authors use natural language processing to determine overlap in patent claims (and just the claims, arguing that's where the thicket lies) for both backward and forward citations in "triads" - patents that all cite each other. Using this methodology, they compare their results to other attempts to quantify complexity and find greater overlap in more complex technologies - a sign that their method is more accurate. Finally, they validate their results by regressing thickets against examination characteristics, showing that the examination factors more likely to come from thickets (e.g. pendency) are correlated with greater thickets.

This is an interesting study. The use of citations (versus technological class) will always be a limitation because not every patent in a thicket winds up being cited by others. However, the method used here (using forward and backward citations) is better than the alternative, which is using only blocking prior art.

The real question is what to do with all this information. Can it be applied beyond mere study of which areas have thickets? I suppose it could be helpful for portfolio purchases, and maybe to help decisions about whether to enter into a new technology.

Chris Walker & Melissa Wasserman on the PTAB and Administrative Law

Christopher Walker is a leading administrative law scholar, and Melissa Wasserman's excellent work on the PTO has often been featured on this blog, so when the two of them teamed up to study how the PTAB fits within broader principles of administrative law, the result—The New World of Agency Adjudication (forthcoming Calif. L. Rev.)—is self-recommending. With a few notable exceptions (such as a 2007 article by Stuart Benjamin and Arti Rai), patent law scholars have paid relatively little attention to administrative law. But the creation of the PTAB has sparked a surge of interest, including multiple Supreme Court cases and a superb symposium at Berkeley earlier this month (including Wasserman, Rai, and many others). Walker and Wasserman's new article is essential reading for anyone following these recent debates, whether you are interested in specific policy issues like PTAB panel stacking or more general trends in administrative review.

The Quest to Patent Perpetual Motion

Those familiar with my work will know that I am a big fan of utility doctrine. I think it is underused and misunderstood. When I teach about operable utility, I use perpetual motion machines as the type of fantastic (and not in a good way) invention that will be rejected by the PTO as inoperable due to violating the laws of thermodynamics.

On my way to a conference last week, I watched a great documentary called Newman about one inventor's quest to patent a perpetual motion machine. The trailer is here, and you can stream it pretty cheaply (I assume it will come to a service at some point):

The movie is really well done, I think. The first two-thirds is a great survey of old footage, along with interviews of many people involved in the saga. The final third focuses on what became of Newman after his court case, leading to a surprising ending that colors how we should look at the first part of the movie. The two acts work really well together, and I think this movie should be of interest to anyone, and not just patent geeks.

That said, I'd like to spend a bit of time on the patent aspects, namely utility doctrine. Wikipedia has a pretty detailed entry, with links to many of the relevant documents. The federal circuit case, Newman v. Quigg, as well as the district court case, also lay out many of the facts. The claim was extremely broad:

38. A device which increases the availability of usable electrical energy or usable motion, or both, from a given mass or masses by a device causing a controlled release of, or reaction to, the gyroscopic type energy particles making up or coming from the atoms of the mass or masses, which in turn, by any properly designed system, causes an energy output greater than the energy input.

Here are some thoughts:

First, the case continues what I believe to be a central confusion in utility. The initial rejection was not based on Section 101 ("new and useful") but on Section 112 (enablement to "make and use"). This is a problematic distinction. As the Patent Board of Appeals even noted: "We do not doubt that a worker in this art with appellant's specification before him could construct a motor ... as shown in Fig. 6 of the drawing." Well, then one could make and use it, even if it failed at its essential purpose. Now, there is an argument that the claim is so broad that Newman didn't enable every device claimed (as in the Incandescent Lamp case), but that's not what the board was describing. The section 101 defense was not added until 1986, well into the district court proceeding. The district court later makes some actual 112 comments (that the description is metaphysical), but this is not the same as failing to achieve the claimed outcome. The Federal Circuit makes clear that 112 can support this type of rejection: "neither is the patent applicant relieved of the requirement of teaching how to achieve the claimed result, even if the theory of operation is not correctly explained or even understood." But this is not really enablement - it's operable utility! The 112 theory of utility is that you can't enable someone to use and invention if it's got no use. But just about every invention has some use. I write about this confusion in my article A Surprisingly Useful Requirement.

Second, this leads to another key point of the case. The failed claim was primarily due to the insistence on claiming perpetual motion. Had Newman claimed a novel motor, then the claim might have survived (though there was a 102/103 rejection somewhere in the history). One of the central themes of the documentary was that Newman needed this patent to commercialize his invention, so others could not steal the idea. He could not share it until it was protected. But he could have achieved this goal with a much narrower patent that did not claim perpetual motion. That he did not attempt a narrower patent is quite revealing, and foreshadows some of the interesting revelations from the end of the documentary.

Third, the special master in the case, William Schuyler, had been Commissioner of Patents. He recommended that the Court grant the patent, finding sufficient evidence to support the claims. It is surprising that he would have issued a report finding operable utility here, putting the Patent Office in the unenviable position of attacking its former chief.

Fourth, the case is an illustration in waiver. Newman claimed that the device only worked properly when ungrounded. More important, the output was measured in complicated ways (according to his own witnesses). Yet, Newman failed to indicate how measurement should be done when it counted: "Dr. Hebner [of National Bureau of Standards] then asked Newman directly where he intended that the power output be measured. His attorney advised Newman not to answer, and Newman and his coterie departed without further comment." The court finds a similar waiver with respect to whether the device should have been grounded, an apparently key requirement. These two waivers allowed the courts to credit the testing over Newman's later objections that the testing was improperly handled.

I'm sure I had briefly read Newman v. Quigg at some point in the past, and the case is cited as the seminal "no perpetual motion machine" case. Even so, I'm glad I watched the documentary to get a better picture of the times and hooplah that went with this, as well as what became of the man who claimed to defy the laws of thermodynamics.

Tribal Sovereign Immunity and Patent Law, Part II: Lessons in Shoddy Reasoning from the PTAB

Guest post by Professor Greg Ablavsky, Stanford Law School

Per Lisa's request, I have returned to offer some thoughts on the PTAB's tribal sovereign immunity decision (you can find my earlier post here and some additional musings coauthored with Lisa here). I had thought I had retired my role of masquerading as an (entirely unqualified) intellectual property lawyer, but, as the PTAB judges clearly haven't relinquished their pretensions to be experts in federal Indian law, here we are.

The upshot is that I find the PTAB's decision highly unpersuasive, for the reasons that follow, and I hope to convince you that, however you feel about the result, the PTAB's purported rationales should give pause. I should stress at the outset that I have no expertise to assess the PTAB's conclusion that Allergan is the "true owner" of the patent, which may well be correct. But the fact that this conclusion could have served as entirely independent basis for the judgment makes the slipshod reasoning in the first part of the decision on tribal immunity all the more egregious. Here are some examples—I hope you'll forgive the dive into Indian law and immunity doctrine:

1. Supreme Court Precedent: The tenor of the PTAB's decision is clear from its quotation of isolated dicta from Kiowa, where, in the process of considering off-reservation tribal sovereign immunity, the Supreme Court expressed some sympathy for the viewpoint of the dissenting Justices: "There are reasons to doubt the wisdom of perpetuating the [tribal immunity] doctrine." But the PTAB omits the key language that came at the end of the Court's discussion of this issue: "[W]e defer to the role Congress may wish to exercise in this important judgment," leaving the decision as to whether to abrogate tribal sovereign immunity—which Congress may do under its "plenary power"—to the legislature. In short, although you wouldn't know it from the PTAB's cherry-picked quotations, Kiowa actually determined that the right approach in the face of uncertainty was to uphold the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity.

Nor was the 20-year-old Kiowa case the last word on this question. Astonishingly, the PTAB's decision never discusses the facts, holding, or reasoning of Bay Mills, even though the Court decided the case, unquestionably its most important recent statement on tribal sovereign immunity, in 2014. There, the Court rejected another effort to invalidate tribal sovereign immunity, stating that "it is fundamentally Congress's job, not ours, to determine whether or how to limit tribal immunity." This rule, the Court held, applied even more forcefully after Congress had had twenty years to revisit the holding in Kiowa and declined to eliminate tribal sovereign immunity. Id.

Arguably, the PTAB should give at least equal deference to congressional determinations as the Supreme Court, especially given the existence of pending legislation abrogating tribal immunity in this context. Or, setting the bar even lower, one would hope that the PTAB would at some point grapple with recent Supreme Court decisions directly on point. But they don't—in part because, as I'll discuss now, they mischaracterize the question as one of first impression.

Evidence of Peer Group Influence on Patent Examiners

Michael Frakes and Melissa Wasserman have gotten a lot of mileage out of their micro data set on patent examiner behavior over time. Prior work includes examination of grant incentives, agency funding, time availability, and user fees.

Their latest paper tackles peer group influence - that is, the effect that both peers at the same level and supervisory examiners have on grant rates. The draft is on SSRN and the abstract is here:

Using application-level data from the Patent Office from 2001 to 2012, merged with personnel data on patent examiners, we explore the extent to which the key decision of examiners — whether to allow a patent — is shaped by the granting styles of her surrounding peers. Taking a number of methodological approaches to dealing with the common obstacles facing peer-effects investigations, we document strong evidence of peer influence. For instance, in the face of a one standard-deviation increase in the grant rate of her peer group, an examiner in her first two years at the Patent Office will experience a 0.15 standard-deviation increase in her own grant rate. Moreover, we document a number of markers suggesting that such influences arise, at least in part, through knowledge spillovers among examiners, as distinct from peer-pressure mechanisms. We even find evidence that some amount of these spillovers may reflect knowledge flows regarding specific pieces of prior art that bear on the patentability of the applications in question, as opposed to just knowledge flows regarding general examination styles. Finally, we find evidence suggesting that the magnitude of these peer examiner influences are just as strong, or stronger, than the influence of the examination styles of supervisors.

I'll admit that I was skeptical upon reading the abstract. After all, I would expect that grant rates would rise and fall together in any given art unit, based on either technology or the trends of the day. Indeed, the effect is not so large as to rule some other influences.

But by the end, I was convinced. Here are a couple of the findings that were most persuasive (in addition to the fact that I think they specified fixed effects nicely):

1. The effect is more present during the early years, and tends to get "locked in" with experience
2. The effect is more present with peers than with supervisory examiners
3. The effect is more present for examiners who do not telecommute - this, to me, was the best robustness check
4. Examiners who do not telecommute tended to behave similarly in obviousness (v. novelty) and also to cite the same prior art (that was not cited as frequently by those to telecommute)

This paper's framing is interesting. I read it, of course, because it is a patent paper, but Frakes & Wasserman open with a more generalized pitch that this is about employment peer effects. I suppose it is about both, really, and it is worth taking a look at if you are interested in either area.

Big Patent Data from Google

UPDATE: I got some new information from the folks at Google, discussed below.

Getting patent data should be easier, but it's not. It is public information, but gathering, organizing, and cleaning it takes time. Combining data sets also takes time. Companies charging a fee do a good job providing different data, but none of them have it all, and some of the best ones can be costly for regular access.

Google has long had patent data, and it has been helpful. Google patents is way easier to use than the USPTO website (though I think their "improvements" have actually made it worse for my purposes, but that's for another day). They also had "bulk" data from the PTO, but those data dumps required work to import into a usable form. I spent 2 days writing a python script that would parse the xml assignment files, but then I had to keep running it to get it updated, as well as pay for storage of the huge database. The PTO Chief Economist has since released (and kept up to date) the same data in Stata format, which is a big help. But it's still not tied to, say, inventor data or litigation data.

So, now, Google is trying to change that. It has announced the Google Patents Public Datasets service on its Cloud Platform and in Google BigQuery. A blog post describing the setup is here and the actual service is here. With the service, you can use SQL search commands to search across multiple databases, including: patent data, assignment data, patent claim data, ptab data, litigation notice data, examiner data, and so forth.

There's good news and bad news with the system. The good news is that it seems to work pretty well. I was able to construct a basic query, though I thought the user interface could be improved with some of the features you see in better DB drag and drop systems (especially where there are so many long database names).

The other good news is that it is apparently expandable. Google will be working with data aggregators to include their data (assuming a membership, I presume), so that you can easily combine from multiple sources at once. Further, there is other data in the system, including Hathi Trust books - so you could, for example, see if inventors have written books, or tie book publishing to inventing over periods of years.

Now, the bad news. First, some of the databases haven't been updated in a while - they are what they were when first released. This leads to second, you are at the mercy of the the PTO and Google. If all is well, then that's great. But if the PTO doesn't update, or Google decides this isn't important any more (any Google Reader fans out there?) then bye-bye.

I look forward to using this as long as I can - it's definitely worth a look.

UPDATE:
Here is what I learned from Google:
1. Beyond data vendors, anyone can upload their own tables to BigQuery and choose who has access. This makes it a great fit for research groups analyzing private data before publication, as well as operating companies and law firms generating reports that combine private portfolio information with paid and public datasets.

2. Each incremental data addition expands the potential queries to be done, and you're no longer limited by what a single vendor can collect and license.

3. The core tables are updated quarterly, so the next update is due out shortly. As Google adds more data vendors, alternatives for the core tables will appear and be interchangeable with different update frequencies.

What can we learn from variation in patent examiner leniency?

Studying the effect of granting vs. rejecting a given patent application can reveal little about the ex ante patent incentive (since ex ante decisions were already made), but it can say a lot about the ex post effect of patents on things like follow-on innovation. But directly comparing granted vs. rejected applications is problematic because one might expect there to be important differences between the underlying inventions and their applicants. In an ideal (for a social scientist) world, some patent applications would be randomly granted or denied in a randomized controlled trial, allowing for a rigorous comparison. There are obviously problems with doing this in the real world—but it turns out that the real world comes close enough.

The USPTO does not randomly grant application A and reject application B, but it does often assign (as good as randomly) application A to a lenient examiner who is very likely to grant, while assigning B to a strict examiner who is very likely to reject. Thus, patent examiner leniency can be used as an instrumental variable for which patent applications are granted. This approach was pioneered by Bhaven Sampat and Heidi Williams in How Do Patents Affect Follow-on Innovation? Evidence from the Human Genome, in which they used this approach to concluded that on average, gene patents appear to have had no effect on follow-on innovation.

Since their seminal work, I have seen a growing number of other scholars adopt this approach, including these recent papers: