The e-symposium spanned five hours and included four separate one-hour sessions with distinguished in-house and private practitioners, as well as a keynote address delivered by George Washington University Law School professor, John Duffy.
Professor Duffy introduced the event with a presentation entitled “Global legal innovation and the future of patent rights”, which emphasised the need for patent owners and practitioners to be creative to find ways of predicting future changes in the legal landscape.
Duffy pointed out that taking a global perspective and innovatively applying the precedents of other systems to one’s own could help to counter “perceived failings in the patent system”.
In one example, Duffy said that so-called intellectual globalism, an approach that entails looking beyond patent law to other fields of law in order to predict change, helped him to discover that about two-thirds of the judges on the BPAI were illegally appointed, a charge which is now being considered in Congress, as well as by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Duffy also employed intellectual globalism in predicting that the power of the Federal Circuit may become increasingly limited in future years, and said that a geographically global perspective indicates a global trend toward decentralised patent examination, while a temporally global perspective reveals that US courts may soon return to using objective factors, rather than legal tests, in determining non-obviousness.
Following Professor Duffy’s keynote, there was a roundtable discussion on US patent reform. The session was sponsored by Oblon Spivak and included Gary Griswold of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform and Duffy’s colleague, John Whealan, of George Washington University Law School.
Griswold reiterated a contention that he has articulated frequently in speeches over the past year when he said that “we are the stewards of the patent system and we have to do a good job” on patent reform.
Whealan, who served as solicitor of the USPTO and counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the US Patent Reform Act, offered an insider’s perspective on the patent reform debate, and said that more compromise is needed among the numerous special interest groups involved in the discussion.
The second session, sponsored by Fish & Richardson, covered international litigation strategies and included Wulf Höflich of Airbus Group, who compared the pros and cons of the patent courts in different European countries.
Fish & Richardson partners Alexander Harguth and Nagendra Setty provided a comparison between litigation techniques in the US and Europe and an overview of the risks associated with forum shopping for patent cases in the US, respectively.
Panellists in the third roundtable of the day considered trends in monetising IP rights in light of decisions such as Medimmune v Genentech and Quanta v LG, and outlined the dos and don’ts for monetising patent portfolios from an in-house perspective. The session included James Malackowski of patent auction company Ocean Tomo and Wayne Sobon of Accenture.
The e-symposium’s platinum sponsor, LexisNexis, kicked off the final session of the day with a discussion of the trends in so-called patent troll behaviour.
Peter Vanderheyden of LexisNexis and Mark Walker of IBM both contended that improved patent quality may be the key to eliminating overly broad patents - and, by extension, many trolls - and agreed that legislation to impose restrictions on troll rights is not the answer.
Jill Wasserman of King & Spalding added that one of the keys to combating troll tactics is to put a troll’s business – ie, its patents – at risk by taking advantage of recent case law, such as KSR v Teleflex, which has arguably made it easier to invalidate a patent for obviousness.
The archived version of the full e-symposium can be accessed for free here.
A full report of the e-symposium will be included in the October issue of Managing IP.
