Smartphone Patent, Copyright Wars Not Stifling Innovation, Says USPTO’s Kappos
There’s no reason to believe that “either copyright or patent lawsuits of the kind we are seeing in the so-called smartphone wars” are stifling technological innovation, said David Kappos, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. At a Wednesday hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Kappos was asked by IP Subcommittee Ranking Member Mel Watt, D-N.C., whether the “rash of patent cases brought by tech companies against [other] tech companies might stifle technological innovation.” He cited a news report that a federal appeals court had allowed Apple to move ahead with a patent infringement suit against Samsung relating to some of its tablets.
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"We have seen this movie before,” Kappos said, referring to the fights that occurred when soldering machines and the telegraph were invented. “We are seeing the same series of events play out.” Companies like Apple that have made “transformative changes in our lives have intellectual property positions from massive investments,” he said. “They seek to enforce those positions to level the playing field in some way and then you have a dust up like we are seeing right now.” That’s not a sign that there’s “anything at all wrong” with the “innovation environment” in the U.S., he said. It’s also not a sign that there’s a “fundamental problem with patents,” Kappos said. The smartphone space is seeing “extremely sharp drops in costs over time with extremely strong increases in performances,” and market leadership changing hands frequently, he said. “What is going on is the natural ebb and flow of technology development."
Kappos said the USPTO is on schedule to implement the America Invents Act (AIA), with final rules set to become effective Sept. 16. It’s clear that policies supporting a “high-quality” IP system are “making a difference in our nation’s economic recovery now,” he said, citing a Department of Commerce report that showed that IP-intensive industries, including the tech sector, accounted for 40 million jobs in 2010 (CD April 12 p8). He said his office is working with counterparts in Europe, China, South Korea, Japan and other trading partners to encourage them to update their patent systems to match the AIA, which sets a “new gold standard for patent systems.”
The Business Software Alliance sought changes in some areas of the proposed AIA rules. The agency should “better define” which patents would potentially be subject for review under the Transitional Program for Covered Business Method Patents, said Timothy Molino, BSA director of government relations, in written testimony (http://xrl.us/bm8bfw). Using the only two criteria proposed by the agency would allow the definition of “covered business method patent” to include anything used in the provision of financial services, he said. “As a result, it could be interpreted to cover a significant number of general software and computing technology patents that have little or nothing to do with business models.”