{"id":178110,"date":"2019-03-04T20:04:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T01:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/03\/04\/why-patent-reform-is-essential\/"},"modified":"2019-03-04T20:04:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T01:04:00","slug":"why-patent-reform-is-essential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/03\/04\/why-patent-reform-is-essential\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Patent Reform is Essential"},"content":{"rendered":"

 It turns out the scam that was Theranos was heavily supported by what experts would call bullsh%$ patents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When Patent Office Director Michelle Lee gave that speech, Theranos appeared to be one of the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley. But later that year, the public learned that Holmes hadn\u2019t \u201cproven\u201d anything. Whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal that Theranos wasn\u2019t even using its own devices for most of its blood testing. Holmes had apparently spent more than a decade building a company based on unrealistic or outright false claims about its revolutionary technology.<\/span>

<\/span>For any disaster as large as Theranos, there\u2019s plenty of blame to go around, of course. Both Holmes and former COO Sunny Balwani now face federal fraud charges. Theranos\u2019 star-studded board of directors failed to do adequate oversight. Walgreens ignored warning signs before launching its in-store partnership. Some VCs and journalists were too eager to believe Theranos\u2019 unproven claims.<\/span>

<\/span>But the patent system also played an important, and often overlooked, role in the situation. The USPTO gave out patents much<\/i> too easily, giving Theranos early credibility it didn\u2019t deserve. Theranos then used these patents to attract staff, investors, and business partners. The company would last for 10+ years and burn through half a billion dollars before the truth finally emerged.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>But Holmes found a more receptive audience at the USPTO. She says she spent five straight days at her computer drafting a patent application. The provisional application<\/a>, filed in September 2003 when Holmes was just 19 years old, describes \u201cmedical devices and methods capable of real-time detection of biological activity and the controlled and localized release of appropriate therapeutic agents.\u201d This provisional application would mature into many issued patents. In fact, there are patent applications still being prosecuted that claim priority back to Holmes\u2019 2003 submission. <\/span>

<\/span>But Holmes\u2019 2003 application was not a \u201creal\u201d invention in any meaningful sense. We know that Theranos spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to develop working diagnostic devices. The tabletop machines Theranos focused on were much less <\/i>ambitious than Holmes\u2019 original vision of a patch. Indeed, it\u2019s fair to say that Holmes\u2019 first patent application was little more than aspirational science fiction written by an eager undergraduate.<\/span>

<\/span>So how did Holmes\u2019 unrealistic application lead to real patents, like US Patent No. 7,291,497<\/a>? If you look through that patent\u2019s application history<\/a>, you can see that the examiner did review it closely. The examiner made two non-final rejections and two final rejections before eventually allowing the claims. (At the USPTO, a \u201cfinal\u201d rejection is not really final<\/a>). The rejections were based on prior art and other technical grounds. What the examiner did not do, however, was ask whether Holmes\u2019 \u201cinvention\u201d actually worked<\/i>.<\/span>

<\/span>Two legal doctrines are relevant here. The “utility” requirement of patent law requires that the invention work. And the \u201cenablement\u201d requirement means that the application has to describe the invention with enough detail to allow a person in the relevant field to build and use it. If the applicant herself can\u2019t build the invention with nearly unlimited time and money, it does not seem like the enablement requirement could possibly be satisfied.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>To answer Professor Grimmelmann\u2019s rhetorical question [What could go wrong with patents being handed out on the “honor system”?] <\/span>\u2014Theranos is what could go wrong. Holmes\u2019 original patent application became a key part of the company\u2019s mythology. For example, an infamous Fortune <\/i>article<\/a> from 2014 reverently tells the story of Holmes staying up late to write her application and suggests that Theranos was founded on that original vision. And if you had visited Theranos\u2019 website in 2014, you would have found an \u201cOur Mission<\/a>\u201d page that said Holmes left Stanford to \u201cbuild Theranos around her patents and vision for healthcare.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Yet more than a decade after Holmes\u2019 first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds<\/i> of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Business Insider<\/i> wrote<\/a> that if Theranos had come up with a \u201ckiller application\u201d for microfluidics, \u201cthat may explain its reluctance to show the patented details that make its technology unique.\u201d This sentence shouldn\u2019t make sense, because patents are public by nature. So \u201cpatented details\u201d should be public<\/i>.<\/span>

<\/span>The sentence only makes sense when you realize that the patent bargain is utterly broken. The people who work within the patent system realize it. That\u2019s why no one raised red flags when Theranos received hundreds of patents without telling the scientific community how its machines actually worked.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is important:  With a very few national security exceptions, patents MUST<\/b> be public, and of sufficient detail to allow a, “Person having ordinary skill in the art<\/a>,”  to reproduce the invention.<\/p>\n

It is SUPPOSED<\/b> to be a part of the deal when you award an exclusive license, but the US patent office almost never rejects a patent on being incomprehensible bullsh%$, as it should.<\/p>\n

We desperately need to raze the USPTO to the ground, and rebuild it from scratch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 It turns out the scam that was Theranos was heavily supported by what experts would call bullsh%$ patents: When Patent Office Director Michelle Lee gave that speech, Theranos appeared to be one of the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley. But later that year, the public learned that Holmes hadn\u2019t \u201cproven\u201d anything. Whistleblowers told The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,588,575,428,429,437],"class_list":["post-178110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-fail","tag-fraud","tag-ip","tag-patent","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}