Saturday, July 21, 2007

Suit filed in D.D.C. to remove Margaret Peterlin

Further to an earlier IPBiz post on Margaret Peterlin, Gregory Aharonian, David Lentini, David Pressman, and Steve Morsa filed suit in D.D.C. on Monday, July 9, 2007 seeking the court to order Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez to dismiss Peterlin immediately and establish rules to assess what qualifies as a professional background and experience in patent or trademark law.

The basis of the suit is a 1999 amendment to the Patent Act that required that the Director and Deputy Director of the USPTO each have "professional experience and background in patent or trademark law."

A July 11 story on DowJones/Morningstar gives details of the matter. One thing that one will NOT find in the Morningstar story is the SIMILARITY in backgrounds between Dudas and Peterlin (e.g., Univ. of Chicago Law School, Hastert, not patent attorney).

The Morningstar story DOES mention that the four suit-filers did NOT get a response about an earlier letter about Peterlin (see As of July 9, the date the suit was filed, the plaintiffs have not received a response, the suit said.). IPBiz notes: Gambling in Casablanca? I'm shocked. Recall, Mark Lemley is not a patent attorney, either, but newspapers write otherwise, without correction.

The Morningstar story DOES get into patent quality, in an odd way: The poor quality of patent examinations harms Aharonian and Morsa by forcing them to pay from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in fees to argue " spurious rejections" of their patent applications, the suit said. Thus, in this universe, patent applications are NOT sailing through; they are being improperly rejected. This is quite a contrast to the 97% grant rate of Quillen and Webster, as endorsed by non-patent-attorney Lemley in the Northwestern Law Review (on rational ignorance).

Note the following posts on IPBiz:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/06/letter-questions-credentials-of.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/origins-of-low-quality-patents.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/peer-to-patent-1078-reviewers-produced.html

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