Who Will Be Posted As Next Director Of The U.S.-PTO (And ...

As a European Patent Attorney writing on a quite Euro-centric Blog I normally won't dare to promote any speculations on the re-shuffle of some posts in the U.S. administration. What made me prick my ears was that obviously Mr David Kappos, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Intellectual Property Law, for IBM Corporation appears to be on the shortlist for that job. Mr Dennis Crouch, Associate Professor University of Missouri School of Law, reports on a survey he had conducted among U.S. Patent Attorneys, and despite the fact that a vast majority of the participants did prefer other candidates (Mr Kappos only received a 5% share of the votes), he is said to be one of very few candidates who actually would be available for that post. Similar reports had earlier been disseminated by Mr Greg Aharonian on his well-known e-mail newsletter, however, together with some pejorative comments on Mr Kappos in view of IBM's general patent policy for which Mr Kappos is deemed to be responsible and which is strongly disliked by Mr Aharonian.

In my view Mr Kappos is a very interesting candidate, and if he ever should get that job this might well indicate some change of attitude towards the patent system as it currently stands. Albeit the relevant presentations I've seen so far have been given by Mr Jonathan Sage and Mr Roger Burt, he surely is the man backing IBM's proposal of a European Interoperability Patent (EIOP) seeking to enhance collaboration-enabling features of the patent system by utilising the License of Right feature of a future EU Community patent (the latter lying now, we all know it, in tatters). IBM's openly presented co-operation with FFII in 2007, their tinkering with means for Balancing open & proprietary innovation as well as their early support for the Peer-To-Patent project have made perfectly clear that they want to see fundamental changes in particular on the patents theatre.

Of course, should Mr Kappos ever become the man at the helm of the U.S.-PTO, it is clear that running a branch of the administration is quite a different thing than running the patent department of a big multinational company ...

Whatever might be the final outcome of the deliberations concerning U.S.-PTO Directorate in Mr Obama's team, it appears to be obvious that the IP landscape will undergo deep changes during the coming decade. The lack of scalability of the patent examination process will probably force measures reducing the growth rates of filing numbers seen during past decades, and the traditional role of the patent business under the umbrella of traditional business models will evolve further. Collaborative approaches in IP strategies will gain more ground than ever. Take, for example, the message originating from Mr Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline. In a recent interview to the Guardian, he assured that GlaxoSmithKline will put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a "patent pool" so they can be explored by other researchers (Link thanks to Mr Joff Wild in his IAM Blog). He did not say anything specific about the conditions of the license and I expect it might be RAND rather than RF, but, given the traditional role of patent protection in the pharmaceutical industry, this sounds like an indication of some tide change to come.

((C) Photo J. Doll: U.S.-PTO)
((C) Photo D. Kappos: EmTech'07)
((C) Photo A. Witty: GlaxoSmithKline)