UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE PATENT PUBLIC ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING Alexandria, Virginia Thursday, August 20, 2015 PARTICIPANTS: PPAC Members: MARK GOODSON PAUL JACOBS MARYLEE JENKINS, Vice Chair ESTHER M. KEPPLINGER, Chair DAN LANG JULIE MAR-SPINOLA WAYNE P. SOBON PETER G. THURLOW F. MICHAEL WALKER USPTO: TIM CALLAHAN, Director, Technology Center 2400 JOHN COTTINGHAM, Director, Office of Petitions ELIZABETH DOUGHERTY, Director of Inventor Education Outreach and Recognition for the Office of Innovation Development ANDREW FAILE, Deputy Commissioner for Patent. Operations BRIAN HANLON, Director, Office of Patent Legal Administration DREW HIRSHFELD, Commissioner for Patents TOM HUGHES, Supervisory Patent Examiner Tech Center 3700 PARTICIPANTS (CONT'D): DAVID LANDRITH, PE2E Portfolio Manager MICHELLE LEE, Under Secretary and Director of the USPTO JENNIFER McDOWELL, Pro Bono Program Coordinator JOHN OWENS, Chief Information Officer CHARLIE PEARSON, Director, Office of International Patent Legal Administration SHIRA PERLMUTTER, Chief Policy Officer and Director for International Affairs TONY SCARDINO, Chief Financial Officer DEBBIE STEPHENS, Associate Commissioner for Patent Information Management VALENCIA MARTIN WALLACE, Deputy Commissioner for Patent Quality Union Members: ROBERT D. BUDENS PTAB: JUDGE NATHAN KELLEY * * * * * P R O C E E D I N G S (8:36 a.m.) MS. KEPPLINGER: Good morning all. Welcome to the PPAC meeting -- Patent Public Advisory Committee. It's my pleasure to be here with all of you today. For the public, we welcome anyone in attendance today and anyone who's online joining us. Thank you for attending, and we'd be happy to take any questions that you might have throughout the sessions. It's my great pleasure to have with us today Michelle Lee, Undersecretary and Director of the USPTO. Shortened that title. That's one of the longest complete titles in the government. And also my extreme honor to have Andrew Hirshfeld here at his first PPAC meeting as the new Commissioner for Patents. So, welcome. We're pleased to have you. PPAC looks forward (applause) -- we look forward to working with you, working closely with you, and I know it will be a great success, so. So, Michelle. MS. LEE: Thank you very much, Ester, and good morning everyone. It's great to see you all again, and we've got a great lineup of presentations that we have all been working very hard on through the several months, and so I want to just jump right down to business with a few updates on my end and then hand it over to Drew Hirshfeld, and we'll continue with the rest of the program. So, very soon after our last meeting in May I traveled to Beijing for meetings with ministers and vice ministers of China's trade, patent, trademark, and copyright offices. But I began my trip with a meeting with one of the most senior officials in the Chinese government, Vice Premiere Wang Yang. And during these meetings, he emphasized China's desire to strengthen IP protection and enforcement, not just because their trading partners were asking for it but because China views it as necessary in their desired transformation from a manufacturing-based economy of inventions developed elsewhere to an innovation- based economy with inventions developed within China. So, from that meeting and my encounters I've had with leaders around the world, I repeatedly hear that the United States is a global leader when it comes to protecting intellectual property. And while we can and should take pride in that, we should also take heed that as China and other countries seek to move from a manufacturing-based economy to an innovation-based economy, we will have more competition, and we cannot afford to sit still as other nations seek to catch up. So, we must work to make our patent system as strong as it can be to drive incentives to innovate and to invest in this country. Here at the USPTO, we are striving to do so in many ways, and I'd like to highlight for you a couple of those ways in which we are doing so. We are making solid progress on our enhanced patent quality initiative. Following the Quality Summit and Federal Register Notice seeking ideas and input on how to enhance the quality of issuing patents, we received more than 1,200 submissions, and thank you to those of you who submitted comments. We reviewed all the feedback, which was very helpful, and identified three themes. You indicated that examiners should clearly articulate their positions on the record. You also recommended that the USPTO needs to differentiate between measures directed to the patent process from those that address the patent product. And you advised that the quality of an interview is more important than the type of interview. We are focusing on these themes now and devising improvements to be rolled out in the coming months, and we welcome your participation. In fact, later this morning we are going to hold an interview demonstration to show you the interactivity possible through videoconferencing. I think you will be very pleased and excited with the quality of this interview option. Turning to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, we are in the process of making enhancements to our AIA trial proceedings. Today, with a prepublication yesterday, we published a set of proposed rules in the Federal Register. Among other things, those proposed rules will allow patent owners to include new testimonial evidence such as expert declaration with their opposition to a petition to institute a proceeding; contain a new requirement on practitioners before the PTAB akin to the federal rules and procedural rule 11 requirements in federal courts to give the USPTO more robust means with which to police misconduct; and clarify that the PTAB will use the clean construction standards used by district courts for patents that will expire during the proceedings and therefore cannot be amended, while maintaining use of the broadest reasonable interpretation for all other cases. As with the Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative, we want your input on these proposals: Did we hit the mark? Or can we do more or make different changes than initially proposed? Next week the Agency is traveling for a series of road shows sponsored with AIPLA. We are delighted to have this opportunity to partner with AIPLA and to hear from you in person in Santa Clara on Monday, August the 24th; Dallas on Wednesday, August the 26th; and Alexandria on Friday, August the 28th. During the morning segment of the program, we will focus on our Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative and share with you more details about our forthcoming enhancements. Then, in the afternoon, we will address our AIA trials, including the proposed rules, as well as feature an actual AIA trial hearing. We are sending a team of Agency experts to each of those three cities, and I encourage you to register with AIPLA to attend. Our discussion at these events is invaluable to building that stronger patent system essential for the 21st century global economy. Turning a minute now to operations, we are currently working with the Department of Commerce to evaluate their new shared services initiative for any possible benefits to the USPTO's HR, IT, and procurement functions. In addition to the USPTO, Commerce as a number of bureaus of various sizes. Each of these bureaus provides support services for their specific mission or obtains these services from other bureaus. Commerce has decided that consolidating mission-supporting services into a shared services organization will provide benefits to the bureaus and to the USPTO. The USPTO currently takes advantage of our authority to obtain services from other agencies and is viewing these shared services initiatives as another opportunity to evaluate alternative ways to provide the highest possible service while effectively managing our financial resources. Finally, to help lead many of the positive changes I have shared with you, I have the pleasure of hiring a new Commissioner for Patents. This is certainly not an everyday occurrence at the USPTO, and it's a good thing because it's a big decision with a host of long-term implications. In this case, the search for a worthy successor to Peggy Focarino was made a lot easier by the fact that no other candidate has the same ideal combination of policy, operations, and examination experience as the colleague sitting to my left, and that's Drew Hirshfeld. In short, Drew has done it all. He began his career at the USPTO in 1994 as a patent examiner and then rose through the Patents organization, becoming a supervisory patent examiner and later group director of Technology Center 2100, overseeing computer networking and database workgroups. During the tenure of Director David Kappos, my predecessor, Drew served two years as USPTO's chief of staff, managing operations and serving as a vital liaison with the Department of Commerce. And most recently, as Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy since November of 2011, Drew developed patent examination guidance on difficult topics like what is patent-eligible subject matter and clarity of the prosecution record. He has my fullest confidence, and I have no doubt that the USPTO and the American public at large will benefit from his wisdom and experience in his new role as Commissioner. And with that, I'd like to pause and answer a few questions, and then I'd be glad to turn it over to Drew to continue with the rest of the program. Yes, Mike. MR. WALKER: Thank you Director Lee -- and congratulations, Drew, to you. So, Director Lee, on the operations side of the shared services that you mentioned, just one comment from the user community side -- I'd say around the IT side, because I think a lot of people in the user community have experience with these shared services operations.