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Patent Law Reformed: Challenges to Existing Patents Flood Trial and Appeal Board
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) was created in September 2012 as part of a patent reform law passed by Congress in 2011. The board accepts and hears challenges to patents that may have not been properly issued. The PTAB now consists of 181 judges. Most of the judges have knowledge not only of intellectual property law, but also have solid technical understanding of diverse fields like chemistry, electrical and software engineering. Over the last 18 months, the court has heard more than 1056 challenge patent cases.
Once a case is submitted to the PTAB, the board must respond with a decision within one year. The board is currently in hiring mode, bringing in more judges to help clear the backlog of cases, and is targeting the hiring of 55 more judges in 2014. Within the next several months we can expect to hear the final decision from the PTAB on a very large number of cases.
A major purpose for the creation of the PTAB was to address the concern that many people feel that patents are increasingly being issued which are severely flawed and which deviate from the inventive spirit of how patents were originally designed to protect creative and non-obvious processes and ideas. Patents have been issued which are vague or which cover ideas that many people consider as obvious — recently many patents appear to have been created simply as a quick way to extract money from businesses.
