"Since 1982, the number of name changes has increased each year," Mr. Ekengren, the patent office director, said.
The patent office director, David J. Kappos, has championed patent reform, and the trade groups and Mr. Schumer have said that he helped to write the Schumer provision.
David S. Kappos, the patent office director and under secretary of commerce for intellectual property, disagreed, saying that the first-to-invent system was flawed because it essentially granted an inventor the right to legally defend his contention that he came up with an idea first.
"Amazon could do anything from trying to narrow its own claim so it doesn't overlap with OpenTV to producing evidence that it invented one-click shopping before OpenTV even applied for its first patent". Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, thinks the whole notion of patenting a particular means of doing business is just a passing fancy.
In the case of the Katz patents, the director of the technology center where the patents were originally examined reviewed the evidence and found that it showed at least one claim in each of the patents was prima facie unpatentable.
The patent office's director, Q. Todd Dickinson, said his agency would be "fine-tuning our examinations in a lot of areas" regarding the handling of business-method patents.
Now the patent office's director says those innovations may be threatened if the office cannot pay for them with money it collects in user fees.
Elisa Konofagou, Robert and Margaret Hariri Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology (Physics), and Hermes Kamimura, her post-doctoral research scientist, were presented with a recently awarded patent by Andrei Iancu, director of the US Patent and Trademark Office and Undersecretary of Commerce.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which were CyPhy Works founder and CTO Helen Greiner, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle K. Lee, Intel Capital President Wendell Brooks and TechCrunch Senior Editor Matt Burns.
In the spring of 2012, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Deputy Director Teresa Stanek Rea attacked India's government in congressional testimony for approving a generic version of a Bayer AG cancer drug called Nexavar.
