“Renewal of USPTO Fee Setting Authority: Giving Full Effect to the America Invents Act”
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House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet U.S. House of Representatives
Follow its sittingsProfessor Wasserman?
Yes.
Mr. Reed?
Yes.
Mr. Rea?
Speaker 4
Okay, thank you very much on that.
I actually associate myself with the comments from Hank Johnson from Georgia, in that, you know, the directive to Congress is to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. And so I think everything that we're considering here, whether it's fees or rules or anything like that, the directive to me as a Congressman from the founders was make sure whatever you're doing promotes that. And I think access to the patent office with the low fee for first-time inventors or micro-entities does that. I also think that we're not doing service or justice to that directive when we subject patent holders to multiple and sometimes parallel challenges to the validity of their patent.
And so I actually like the rule that Director Squires has put forward. I think it will bring some clarity to the system. And I'm hearing from the, we'll call them stakeholders, these are people who hold patents and apply for patents, most of them are happy with the changes that have resulted from that. I know we don't have unanimity here based on the opening statements, but the ones that I'm hearing the most complaints from are Big Tech. I would just like to ask you, Mr. Kappos, you did in the past express concern about multiple challenges and parallel challenges.
Do you still have that concern?
Yes, I do.
Speaker 4
And you may disagree with Mr. Squires about how the factors are being weighed, but it's a that's a separate legal question of whether he possesses that institutional discretion, isn't it?
It is, yes.
Speaker 4
Yeah. So, I want to just I've got one minute left say why I like the the rule that he's put forward. It protects patent holders against repetitive challenges by requiring PTAB petitioners to forgo future challenges to the same patent. It prevents multiple challenges against patent claims previously upheld as valid.
And it would ensure patents are challenged at the PTAB only when faster than district court or the ITC. And it requires extraordinary circumstances to overcome other bars to institution. I think these are all noble things, all good things that we want. I think the gold standard here—and I know it's not perfectly attainable—is that when you get that patent from the Patent Office, you have the imprimatur of the federal government that you have something that's novel, non-obvious, and useful, and that you can go use that to raise money, and with certainty in the patent system, we will have a strong entrepreneurial system behind it that will support the development of these ideas.
Darrell Issa
I thank the gentleman, those are good comments. I might only ask Mr. Kappos to clarify that it is 314(a) that sets out the limitations. It is not discretionary, it's discretionary pursuant to that provision in the law, isn't that correct?
Sure, yes.
Darrell Issa
Thank you. With that, we go to the ranking member of the full committee, the gentleman from Maryland, for five minutes.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Kappos, when President Trump announced the Board of Peace in January, it looked to me like a money laundering scheme for countries with dubious human rights records and a lot of oil money to use to curry favor with the President. And we didn't know a lot about this Board of Peace, its structure, its organization, its operations, other than the fact that it had declared that Donald Trump would be president for life of the organization, which didn't give us much comfort that this would be a legitimate public project under the rule of law. Nine months later, we still know next to nothing about the Board of Peace.
I'm still following up with America's agencies to make sure that taxpayer money is not being funneled to a group that exists under the apparently lawless discretion of its president for life. But we were all seriously disturbed to learn that Mr. Squires, the USPTO director, had tried to obtain trademark rights to protect the Board of Peace name and logo. My understanding was and is only strengthened that
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