On June 9-11, the IP Business Congress sponsored by Intellectual Asset Magazine (IAM) hosted a debate on the resolution: “This house believes that the America Invents Act should be a legislative line in the sand and that no more reform of the US patent system is needed.” The debate was moderated by Denise DeFranco, a partner with the Finnegan law firm. Arguing on behalf of the resolution were David Schwartz, Associate Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Wayne Sobon, Vice President and General Counsel of Inventergy, Inc. Arguing against the resolution were Michael Meurer, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and Dan Lang, Vice President, Intellectual Property, Cisco.
With Mr. Sobon’s permission, we are publishing here a slightly modified version of his opening statement at the IP Business Congress debate. Mr. Sobon spoke for himself and not on behalf of his employer or any other institutions.
A Line in the Sand on the Calls for New Patent Legislation
Wayne Sobon
Vice President & General Counsel, Inventergy
With the June 4, 2013 announcement by the Obama Administration of a new set of legislative priorities to change our patent laws yet again, bolstered by a chorus of academics and interested corporations, there are now four separate bills in Congress (with more coming) proposing a wide range of changes to the patent system. Fresh from the seven-year battle that concluded with the America Invents Act of 2011, we once more face a highly emotionally-driven campaign to alter the rules of the field, replete with name-calling (“trolls”).
But just as with our personal conflicts, the best way forward usually comes once we let emotions cool and we dispassionately take a longer view.
We just spent the better part of a decade — following significant research, public hearings, the reports of the National Academies of Science and the FTC, and the testimony of a wide variety of NGOs, corporations, and private inventors and citizens — debating and then approving the most significant changes to our patent system since the 1952 Act. The America Invents Act of 2011was argued in forums like this and on the floor of our Congress as the needed corrective for poor-quality patents, claimed by so-called “trolls” to hold up and oppress innovative companies.
Various companies such as Cisco testified before Congress that the sweeping collection of provisions that make up the AIA were necessary to achieve these policy goals. When it was enacted, it was heralded as “the most significant reform of the U.S. patent system since 1836.” Yet the ink is barely dry, and the voluminous regulations implementing the AIA have barely been set in motion, when the same group of academics and industry players are once again demanding sweeping new changes to the patent laws.
The United States intellectual property system is a precious resource. Indeed, the Founding Fathers saw a unified, national regime of patent laws as so crucial to our democracy that they enshrined it as one of the key powers of Congress. Unanimously and without debate, they passed Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of our Constitution. One of the first acts of the first Congress was to pass the Patent Law of 1790. That law has only been significantly amended five times in the last 220 some years. Five times. 1793, 1836, 1870, 1952 and 2011.
One genius of our patent system has been an implicit recognition that since its underlying subject matter, innovation, remains by definition in constant flux, the scaffolding of our system and the ability of all stakeholders to make reasonably consistent, prudent and socially efficient choices, should remain as stable as possible. But now these latest moves, demanding yet further significant changes to our patent laws, threaten that stability. And it is in fact systemic instability, from whatever source, that allows the very parasitic behaviors we have termed “troll”-like, to flourish.
It is silly and blindly ahistoric to lump anyone who seeks to license or enforce a patent right, but who does not themselves make a corresponding product, as a “troll.” Many arguments about Non-Practicing Entities (NPE), Patent Assertion Entities (PAE), Patent Licensing Assertion Entities (PLAE) — the various formal names and acronyms for the more commonly known epithet, “patent troll” — include an implicit and often explicit emotional condemnation of any patent holder who either did not invent or does not manufacture the patented products. The President’s statements unfortunately are replete with such derision of people or firms who “don’t actually produce anything themselves.”
Yet, from the very outset, our American patent system distinguished itself from its English predecessor, by establishing the unfettered sale in the marketplace of patent rights, precisely because patents are private property rights (see here, here, and here). In England, patent monopolies were still mostly creatures of the Crown — personal privileges. See B. Zorina Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 36-38. The United States patent system, based upon objective criteria for inventiveness and established in freely-alienable property rights, was as significant a revolution in the commercial sphere as the federalist structure was in the political. Id., pp. 49-51, 60-62. And it’s hard to argue against the unprecedented success of the American economy based on the patented innovation protected by these laws.
And indeed, it might come as a surprise, that many of the inventor giants we hold in such high regard today in fact never manufactured the products covered by their patents. Elias Howe did not make sewing machines. Rather, having invented the hugely important lock-stitch technology, but being poor himself, he assembled financing, using then novel securitization of patents, and then licensed his patent to others (and famously, fought the equivalent of our smart phone wars, against Singer). Charles Goodyear never manufactured any rubber; he licensed his vulcanization process to others. Thomas Edison also received third-party financing to operate his famous invention factory in Menlo Park, and he licensed his patented inventions to other companies for manufacture and sale in the marketplace, such as his invention of the first electric pen. And when the unscrupulous refused to pay licenses, each of these inventors of course moved to enforce.
Rather than focus on practicing vs. non-practicing, as manufacturing and licensing are both equal rights in practicing a property right, let’s focus instead on parasitic behaviors. Let’s respect the genius of our Founders, and make few if any changes to the structure of our system. And let’s focus on specific, targeted interventions that can actually cut off the systemic rot upon which parasitic behavior thrives.
Here are two important areas that could benefit from targeted interventions: (1) the high costs of litigation for all participants, and (2) the rampant and extended uncertainty of patent disputes. Both of these interventions rest soundly in the discretion of our Federal Courts. We already have the tools to bring down discovery costs (I’d argue we need less discovery than what we spend so much time, money, energy and emotion on to yield valid, fair results). And as noted by now-former Chief Judge Randall Rader in his many public comments, judges already have the legal and procedural tools to cull sham lawsuits from the courts. It just requires exercising judgment, as they ably can and do. That’s why they’re called judges.
We do not need yet more statutory changes, changes that will engender more uncertainty and another decade of resulting litigation, to achieve the particular policy goals here. We simply need our judges and our existing system to do the job they already have.