Monday, April 12, 2010

Great Quotes 01 - Dicta in the Federal Circuit

Judge Lourie's comment about the binding nature of Supreme Court dicta in Ariad v. Eli Lilly (Fed. Cir. 3/22/2010)(in banc):
"As a subordinate federal court, we may not so easily dismiss such [Supreme Court] statements as dicta but are bound to follow them." (at *29)
may be contrasted with the concerns of Senior Judge Nichols in a concurrence in a 1984 Federal Circuit decision, admittedly about Federal Circuit dicta, but relevant nevertheless:
"In future cases parts of this opinion will be cited, and the response will be made that the words referred to are dicta. Future judges of this court may be struck by our wisdom and wish to follow our words, or they may perceive they are confronted with a problem we did not foresee, and find our words an embarrassment. In the latter event, it cannot now be predicted whether they will profess themselves bound by our statements, or reject them as nonbinding dicta. The future utility or subsequent career of a dictum is wholly unpredictable, and that is why judges over centuries have avoided dicta, or at least said they were doing so. When a judicial exposition relates to a concrete issue to be decided, the record facts add meaning to the words, and safeguards exist against their being read out of context. With a dictum this is not so, and it may well end up having an effect the judicial author never intended."
Railroad Dynamics, Inc. v. A. Stucki Co., 727 F.2d 1506, 1523-24 (Fed. Cir. 1984) (MARKEY, Friedman, Nichols) (Nichols, J. concurring).

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Start of Several Series

I plan to post a number of pieces that share a general subject.  I've described my intentions in the companion blog myunpublishedworks2.  Please stay tuned!

Thanks.

RJM
April 6, 2010

Friday, March 12, 2010

PTO Reform Ideas - 02: Examining Patentable Subject Matter

At the February 26, 2010 Stanford Technology Law Review Symposium on PTO Reform Arti K. Rai, Administrator for External Affairs at the USPTO, and the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke University, gave the Opening Remarks. Among other things, she summarized some ideas for internal reforms that the PTO is implementing.

One reform will give examiners more time and credit for EARLY evaluation of Patentable Subject Matter (35 USC 101). When Prof. Rai spoke about this, I was happy until the word "EARLY." Yes, give examiners more time and credit for doing their jobs. But please, NOT for an EARLY analysis of Patentable Subject Matter (PSM).

As I said in October 2009 in An Urgent Letter and Time Sensitive Proposal to David Kappos, as well as in my amicus brief to the Federal Circuit in In re Bilski, only claims IN CONDITION FOR ALLOWANCE should be analyzed for PSM.

EFFICIENCY AND ECONOMY
A primary reason to defer PSM analysis is that many apparent PSM problems will disappear when claims are amended or abandoned in response to rejections based on prior art or lack of enablement. By postponing PSM analysis until the claims are allowable, both the PTO and the applicants will save time and money.

NO DATA YET? GET SOME!
If PTO management doubts my efficiency / conservation of resources argument, it better collect some data. How many claims survive intact from application through allowance? Let us call this the allowed-without-amendment rate (AWOA), where both the numerator and the denominator are based on ONLY the claims submitted at filing.

Of course, that's not the total number of claims the PTO may have to examine before the case closes, because often additional claims are proposed during prosecution. The PTO should also know that statistic -- the number of claims at filing divided by the total number of claims considered, the inflation rate, as it were -- but I have never seen it reported. Since, however, the subject of the moment is early PSM analysis, the PTO can ignore all claims other than those submitted at filing, and perhaps should care most about the AWOA rate for independent claims.

Any AWOA rate will be hard for an ordinary person to calculate, but the PTO should be able to do it. The Index of Claims from the back of the file wrapper, nowadays available on PAIR in the Image File Wrapper (sometimes) in a document called Index of Claims (FWCLM) is the key.

The PTO should evaluate aggregate data as well as data for those classifications that have the highest rate of PSM rejections. (Does the PTO have data of PSM rejection rates by class? It needs that information, too.)

OTHER DATA, WHILE YOU'RE AT IT
The AWOA percentage rate may show some dependence on other factors: the number of applications in the chain, the total number of proposed claims during the life of the application, the years of experience of the examiner, the calendar date of the notice of allowance, etc. Perhaps the PTO has a statistician who can do some serious regression analysis.

GUESSING THE AWOA RATE
I do not know the percentage of claims submitted at filing that are allowed without amendment (whether independent claims only, or both independent and dependent), but I have my suspicions. It's not likely to be much higher than 10%, averaging over all applications, including those that are abandoned (in which case the rate is 0%).

If you are an experienced prosecutor, I would love to know your educated guess.


WHAT I CAN DO IN THE MEANTIME
I propose to make a quick survey of 100 published applications that have Image File Wrappers and a final result. I’ll use a random number generator to select my sample. I should be able to obtain a ballpark estimate on how many claims survive intact to allowance as a percentage of claims originally filed. I'm curious about the average of the percentages for each application in the survey, as well as the average for all applications taken together, and also about how different those numbers may be if I consider only independent claims or all claims. More on the survey will appear in this blog.

WHAT THE PTO CAN DO IN THE MEANTIME
Meanwhile, PTO management should reconsider the early-PSM initiative. I appreciate that the PTO's failure to moot Bilski v. Kappos while it had a chance to do so (see October 2009 Urgent Letter post mentioned above) complicates things. It is quite possible that the Supreme Court decision will mandate such early analysis. If that happens, the PTO should run to Congress for a repeal.

Of course, the PTO will need to be armed with the data I mentioned above, and its spokesperson must be someone who understands that, as the PTO’s own publicity states, the essence of a sensible and trustworthy patent system is that it compares each inventor's claims to the prior art. (See the PTO 2008 Annual Report, page 22, referenced as n.3 in the Urgent Letter.)

RESTATEMENT OF [MY VIEW OF] THE LAW
I also appreciate that the foolish rush to evaluate claims for PSM before they have been determined to be valid over the prior art goes back at least to the "threshold inquiry" language in In re Comiskey which in turn dates from a remark in Parker v. Flook. In my Urgent Letter, under the heading CLEARING UP THE "THRESHOLD INQUIRY" MISUNDERSTANDING, I addressed the posture of Flook and the lack of authority (or thought or analysis or understanding of the patent system) behind the Supreme Court's statement that PSM -- "what TYPE of discovery is sought to be patented" (emphasis mine -- "must precede" examination on the merits.

I won't go through it all again, but it is still true. Read Flook for yourself. Also think about how the purposes of a patent system are, or are not, served, by evaluating PSM without regard to whether or not the claims are enabled or read on the prior art.

Last rev 3/12/2010 9:20 pm

PTO Reform Ideas (thoughts inspired by the 2010 STLR Symposium): Part 01 - Introduction

On Friday, February 26, 2010, the students of the Stanford Technology Law Review held a symposium on PTO reform. The organizers, Connor Williams and Tim Saulsbury, with help from Tim's co-Editor-in-Chief Vinita Kailasanath and SLATA President Laura Zapiain, did a stellar job. If I should mention anyone else, please tell me.

I was privileged to be a commentator for the presentation by Ron Katznelson, and I attended almost all the other sessions and talked with many attendees during the breaks. Everyone -- speakers, commentators, and audience -- gave me many things to think about.

The experience has motivated me to write a series of blog posts under the title "PTO Reform Ideas 2010."

The Opening Remarks for the Symposium were given by Arti K. Rai, Administrator for External Affairs at the USPTO, and the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke University. I will therefore begin the series by commenting on some of the PTO's proposals for internal reform that Prof. Rai mentioned in her talk.