Table Of ContentUNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
PATENT PUBLIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE
QUARTERLY MEETING
Alexandria, Virginia
Thursday, February 1, 2018
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1 PARTICIPANTS:
2 PPAC Members:
3 MARYLEE JENKINS, Chair
4 BERNARD KNIGHT
5 JENNIFER CAMACHO
6 MICHAEL WALKER
7 PETER THURLOW
8 DAN LANG
9 JULIE MAR-SPINOLA
10 MARK GOODSON
11 JEFF SEARS
12 Union Members:
13 PAMELA SCHWARTZ
14 CATHERINE FAINT
15 USPTO:
16 THOMAS BEACH, PE2E & PTAB Portfolio Manager
17 SCOTT BOALICK, Deputy Chief Judge, Patent and
Trial Appeal Board
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MELANIE CANTER, Staff Attorney, Office of
19 Enrollment and Discipline
20 DAVID CHILES, Acting Chief Information Officer
21 DANA COLARULLI, Director, Office of Governmental
Affairs
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1 PARTICIPANTS (CONT'D):
2 WILLIAM COVEY, Deputy General Counsel and
Director of OED
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ANDREW FAILE, Deputy Commissioner for Patent
4 Operations
5 DAHLIA GEORGE, Staff Attorney, Office of
Enrollment and Discipline
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DON HAJEC, Assistant Deputy Commissioner for
7 Patent Operations
8 GARY JONES, Director, Office of Patent Training
9 DAVID LANDRITH, Portfolio Manager
10 JERRY LORENGO, Director, Technology Center 3700
11 SHIRA PERLMUTTER, Chief Policy Officer and
Director for International Affairs
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MARK POWELL, Deputy Commissioner for
13 International Patent Cooperation
14 DAVID RUSCHKE, Chief Judge, Patent Trial and
Appeal Board
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ANTHONY SCARDINO, Chief Financial Officer
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DEBBIE STEPHENS, Associate Commissioner for
17 Patent Information Management
18 DAN SULLIVAN, Director, Technology Center 1600
19 KAREN YOUNG, Director, Technology Center 2900
20 VALENCIA MARTIN WALLACE, Deputy Commissioner
for Patent Quality
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1 PARTICIPANTS (CON'T):
2 Other Participants:
3 JOE MATAL, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce
4 BOB BAHR
5 MARY CRITHRIS
6 DREW HIRSHFELD
7 BERNARD KNIGHT
8 LARRY LIAN
9 CHARLES PEARSON
10 RICK SEIDEL
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 (9:00 a.m.)
3 MS. JENKINS: Good morning. Good
4 morning, everyone. We're going to start our PPAC
5 quarterly meeting of February 1st. I'm not sure
6 where last year went to, but we're not in February
7 and so it is the first meeting of PPAC for the
8 year. Hi. I'm Marylee Jenkins. I am Chair of
9 PPAC and welcome, everyone. Thank you for
10 attending. Thank you for attending via the web.
11 It is live. So we're going to start.
12 We have a lot of topics. Very interesting
13 developments at the office and always a good
14 source of information for folks who are logging in
15 or sitting here in the audience of what is going
16 on at the moment at the USPTO. I encourage you to
17 also recommend these meetings to colleagues and
18 friends because you learn so much about the
19 activities of what we do with the PTO, as well as
20 what is going on here. So I'm also going to warn
21 you that my voice is kind of coming and going so
22 Mike may have to interpreter later on. He said
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1 not a problem earlier. So with that, I would like
2 to introduce Joe Matal. He is preforming the
3 functions and duties of the Undersecretary of
4 Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of
5 the USPTO, and I always call him the interim
6 directors, so.
7 MR. MATAL: Thank you, Marylee, for that
8 introduction. First of all, I'd like to
9 acknowledge our three new PPAC appointments. All
10 three of whom are reappointments and are serving a
11 second term: Mike Walker, Dan Lang, and Mark
12 Goodson. Welcome back to PPAC and we look forward
13 to your second term of the committee. A few
14 updates. The President's nominee for director
15 Andrei Iancu is locked in to get a vote before the
16 U.S. Senate on Monday at 5:00 so you'll be able to
17 watch that on TV. We don't expect the vote to be,
18 contrary to some of the press accounts, it's
19 pretty clear the reason they scheduled this for a
20 vote is the Senate periodically does bed check
21 votes on Monday night for some of the senators to
22 show up, and that appears to be the reason this
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1 was scheduled for a vote, but we expect him to be
2 confirmed overwhelmingly. After the confirmation
3 it typically takes a couple of days for the
4 President to sign paperwork, so Andrei should be
5 sworn in as director within about a week. A
6 couple more updates. We recently went through a
7 brief government shutdown, but in the course of
8 that shutdown OMB authorized PTO to use its
9 reserve funds. We have funds reserved from --
10 user fees reserved from past payments that allowed
11 the agency to remain open for a period of time.
12 There are threats of shutdowns looming in the
13 future. The CR that was agreed to is pretty
14 short, but given this recent precedent we're
15 confident that it seems likely we'll -- again, we
16 wouldn't be affected by a brief shutdown. We'd be
17 allowed to use our reserve funds to continue to
18 operate. Some brief update on patents' issues.
19 For the first three months of this year
20 compared to the first three months of the last
21 fiscal year we've actually had a 5.4 percent
22 increase in serialized patent filings, new patent
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1 applications. That's our first substantial
2 increase like that in a while. It came as a bit
3 of a surprise to us, but patents are popular
4 again. They've come back into style and we're
5 heartened to see that rise. This has also been
6 accompanied by a 9.1 percent decrease in RCEs
7 which is also a good thing. RCEs are effectively
8 do overs, and various programs we're instituted
9 seem to have some success and leading to a
10 decrease in RCEs. Also, an update about matters
11 before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Our ex
12 parte backlog continues to go down. The board's
13 made great progress in reducing the pendency of ex
14 parte appeals which still make up about two thirds
15 of the board's work, and the board continues to
16 comply with all of its statutory deadlines. For
17 the first time ever it did make two exceptions to
18 that deadline. After the Aqua [phonetic] products
19 case came down, vacating our rule governing
20 amendments and IPRs the board did extend the
21 deadline for two pending IPRs that involved
22 amendments until the agency was able to issue
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1 guidance across the board as to how to handle
2 amendments on those cases. Both of those cases
3 have since been disposed of now that the guidance
4 has been issued. The Supreme Court had oral
5 argument in the oil states case involving the
6 constitutionality of AI trials. Several of us
7 from the agency managed to get tickets to attend
8 that argument and heard the Justices' comments.
9 I'm sure you've all -- many of you have probably
10 read the transcripts or followed the cases well.
11 The tenor of the argument reinforced our optimism
12 about the outcome of the case. We also had a
13 decision in the Wi-Fi one case involving the
14 appeal -- ability of institution decisions, an
15 issues that we won in (inaudible), but, you know,
16 agency has taken the view that the statutory
17 provision that institution decisions are final and
18 non-appealable means that they're final and can't
19 be appealed, but we got an adverse result on that
20 in the federal circuit. We're not sure this will
21 be the final word. There are still two cases
22 pending in the Supreme Court that also raised this
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1 issue Anser Sharari secure access and unwired
2 planet cases, and it's possible this issue will
3 come up again. And then just a brief note about
4 the shared services, an issue which has been
5 discussed in the past. We're still in
6 negotiations with CFO staff at the Commerce
7 Department over the scope of a contract to
8 evaluate the shared services project, have an
9 outside auditor look at it. Outside auditor look
10 at it and see if it would make sense. And then,
11 finally, I'll just note that we have an exciting
12 and jam packed agenda for all of you today. We'll
13 get updates from the patents organization,
14 including the patent quality team for our
15 international office. Later the Patent Trial and
16 Appeal Board will present on its issues. We'll
17 have an update from the office of gov affairs as
18 to what's going on on Capitol Hill. Not a lot of
19 activity on big patent legislation like we saw in
20 the past two Congresses, but some small but still
21 significant things going on. And then, finally,
22 our Office of enrollment and Discipline will cap
Description:5 111,000 RCEs in the backlog, and through. 6 roundtable discussions we had a whole RCE-centered. 7 roundtable set of discussions with the public 13 meaningless but the really important thing to. 14 understand for anybody appearing before the Board. 15 is exactly is what David said. The judges
