主 题：Patent Reform in the U.S.: The America Invents Act and Beyond
主讲人：Dr. Arti Rai
Elvin R. Latty Professor of Duke Law School
主持人：梁正 博士
294俄罗斯专享会副教授，清华大学中国科技政策研究中心主任助理
评论人：何菁 博士 安杰律师事务所合伙人
冯术杰 博士 清华大学法学院助理教授
时 间：2013年6月21日（星期五）13:00-15:00
地 点：294俄罗斯专享会302会议室
语 言：英文
主题内容：In 2011, the U.S. Congress passed the most significant patent reform legislation enacted in over 50 years. Work on this legislation, known as the America Invents Act of 2011 (“AIA”), started in earnest in 2005, following thorough critiques of the existing system by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The key goals included improving patent quality, rationalizing patent infringement remedies, and further harmonizing U.S. patent law with the patent law of other countries.
While legislation was pending, the U.S. Supreme Court became very active on the patent front. Starting in 2006, the Court began issuing decisions raising the validity requirements for getting a U.S. patent and making it easier to challenge the validity of granted patents in judicial proceedings. The Court also raised the standard for securing injunctive relief on patents that cover only a small component of a final product, thereby easing the concerns of hi-tech defendants whose products potentially infringe thousands of patents.
Partly because of the Court’s intervening actions, the final AIA legislation no longer focused on remedies. Instead, the Act’s most important feature is a dramatic reworking of the administrative procedures utilized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The AIA sets up the PTO to serve as the main institution for weeding out granted patents of poor quality. The Act also moves the U.S. closer to standards used by the rest of the world in determining questions of patent priority and what constitutes prior art.
The move to greater harmonization improves prospects for work sharing among the overburdened patent offices of the world. Patent litigants in the U.S. also appear to be finding PTO proceedings a valuable alternative to expensive court litigation.
Even so, less than 2 years after AIA passage, additional reform is being actively discussed. Current proposals, some of which were endorsed by President Obama only weeks ago, aim to curb litigation tactics used by patent-assertion entities (PAEs), which some analysts argue cost the U.S. economy tens of billions of dollars annually. The proposals also aim to improve the quality of software patents, patents that are often used in PAE suits.
In this lecture, Professor Arti Rai reviews the past, present, and future of patent reform in the U.S. She does so both from her perspective as an internationally recognized professor of patent law and as the chief policy analyst at the USPTO from 2009-2010.
主讲人简介：Arti Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, innovation policy, and administrative law. Rai has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. Rai's research on IP law and policy in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and software has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Kauffman Foundation.
Rai has published over 50 articles, essays, and book chapters on IP law, innovation policy, and administrative law. Her publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Columbia, Georgetown, and Northwestern law reviews. She is the editor of Intellectual Property Law and Biotechnology: Critical Concepts (Edward Elgar, 2011), the co-author of a 2012 Kauffman Foundation monograph on cost-effective health care innovation, and the co-author of a casebook on law and the mental health system.
From 2009-2010, Rai served as the Administrator of the Office of External Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As External Affairs Administrator, Rai led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to that time, she had served on President-Elect Obama’s transition team reviewing the USPTO. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; was a litigation associate at Jenner & Block (doing patent litigation as well as other litigation); and was a litigator at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.
Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on IP law and policy issues and regularly advises federal agencies on IP policy issues raised by the research that they fund. She currently serves on advisory councils to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Human Genome Research Institute. Rai is a member of the American Law Institute and also co-chair of the IP Committee of the Administrative Law Section of the ABA.
Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991.
