JONES DAY TALKS® - Women in IP: 2021 in Review
Jones Day partners Meredith Wilkes, Patricia Campbell, and Sarah Geers discuss the implementation of the Trademark Modernization Act, the recent decision in Thaler v Hirshfeld – a case involving protections for works created by artificial intelligence, opportunities for monetizing COVID 19-related patents, and other significant legal developments in the IP space during the last year.
For information on the Firm's Women in IP Initiative and their coming events, email WomeninIP@jonesday.com..
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A full transcript follows:
Dave Dalton:
You're about to hear what's one of Jones Day Talks' most popular programs each year. Every December, the firm's Women in IP Initiative is kind enough to present a year-in-review program where they discuss recent high profile intellectual property matters and developments that affect US businesses across industries. Today, they touch on the Trademark Modernization Act, a recent decision and a case involving protections for works created by artificial intelligence, the monetization of COVID 19 related patents and more. Lots of information is coming. Stay here, take notes. I'm Dave Dalton. You're listening to Jones Day Talks.
Jones Day partner, Meredith Wilkes, co-leads the firm's global trademarks, unfair competition and copyrights group. She's a lead trial lawyer who has focused on high stakes trademark, trade dress, trade secret, false advertising and design patent litigation leading matters for global grants and federal and state course throughout the United States for more than 25 years. Meredith also chairs the firm's Women in IP Initiative. And partner, Patricia Campbell, PhD advises clients in all aspects of patent portfolio development in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. She's a former associate professor in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington. In addition to patent procurement and portfolio management, Patricia advises client regarding patentability, patent term extensions, orange book listing, validity, infringement, and freedom to operate issues, and performs due diligence valuations of patent portfolios for possible investment, licensing and acquisition.
In fact, as I mentioned, we'll talk with our panel about patent licensing matters in the COVID-19 space in a moment. And Sarah Geers represents pharmaceutical clients and intellectual property litigation in a variety of venues, including district courts, arbitration, and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB. Her practice spans Hatch-Waxman and other patent infringement actions, enterprise review proceedings, trade secret, and misappropriation actions. Sarah has litigation experience in discovery, trial and appeals. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law, where she teaches a course on patent litigation. Meredith, Patricia, Sarah, thanks for making some time for us today.
Sarah Geers:
Thanks for having us, Dave.
Meredith Wilkes:
Thanks, Dave.
Patricia Campbell:
Thanks, Dave.
Dave Dalton:
I look forward to this one every year. Meredith, we've been doing the Women in IP Podcast with the year-in-review. Is this our fourth one?
Meredith Wilkes:
I think it is, Dave. Yeah, I think that's right.
Dave Dalton:
I didn't mean to put you on the spot. It's dawning on me, because I was going over my notes earlier and I thought we've done this, and we've pulled it off again, Meredith, another year, so congrats for that. But we've got a lot to cover today, so let's jump right in. Meredith, in fact, let's start with you. Regulations implementing the Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 go into effect this December, December 18th, 2021, to be exact. Now, we've talked about this before, it came up during one of our programs earlier this year. But give us a quick review, if you can. What is the TMA and how was it originally introduced and under what circumstances?
Meredith Wilkes:
One of the positive aspects, I suppose, if you could call it that of the COVID pandemic was realized at the end of the year last year, and in connection with an omnibus COVID relief package, the Trademark Modernization Act snuck right in at the end of 2020. And trademark practitioners across the United States were very pleased to see that something that really had been in the works for such a long time didn't get forgotten by year end. One component of it went into effect right away, at the beginning of 2021. They were restoring the presumption of irreparable harm in trademark infringement cases. But the rest of the act needed some time to go through the trademark office and some rule making. And so, the rest of those provisions go into effect on December 18th, coming up here. A little Hanukkah Christmas present for everybody, and those changes focus more on the prosecution side of the house.
And the best way to characterize them, as a whole, would be cost effective tools to deal with what we refer to as dead wood on the register. Meaning that there are these marks that are out, they're registered. And so, as registered trademarks, they are barriers to new applications and that sort of thing, and they're out there. They're blocking new applications. They're blocking legitimate brand owners from expanding their rights or protecting new brands, and they're not in use. And in the United States, use is critical to maintaining trademark rights. And so, these provisions are really aimed at getting rid of that dead wood, whether it's through expungement or reexamination proceedings, which is something that's new for trademark practitioners, not for our patent colleagues who are joining us today, but for trademark folks, expungement and reexamination to attack registrations. And then a really amped up letter of protest procedure that allows us to go in there and look at pending applications and try and challenge those before they ever get to a registration situation.
There are some changes also to streamline and try and move the along little bit faster, so everyone's going to have to change their docketing software, because we're changing office action response time from six months to 60 days. Really, high level, nutshell review, but some big changes coming, more so, on the prosecution side of the house.
Dave Dalton:
I gather by your tone and the way you tick through this, I sense this was something that was probably overdue. These sorts of changes.
Meredith Wilkes:
Absolutely, Dave. And some of these have really been in the works through pilot programs in the trademark office since 2012, 2013, we've been studying this and looking for the right ways to try and streamline and get rid of this dead wood. Particularly in view of the huge uptick of foreign filed applications and foreign registrations in the United States that are just not in use, and that are blocking legitimate brand rights, and legitimate brand owners from exercising those rights.
Dave Dalton:
Good. As you said, overdue and glad, whatever circumstances there were, COVID or no, we're glad this is happening certainly. We'll come back to you shortly, Meredith maybe hit on some more points on that. Let's go over to Patricia Campbell. Patricia, welcome back. It's been a while since [crosstalk 00:06:08].
Patricia Campbell:
Yeah, it has. Hey, David.
Dave Dalton:
You sound good. Thanks for joining us today and looking forward to hearing from you. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. Now, we've done several AI oriented podcasts in the four and a half or so years we've been doing this program, but it has been a while. September 2nd, 2021, a US district court, in Thaler V Hirshfield, holds that an artificial intelligence device cannot be an inventor under current US patent law. Now, Patricia, the question as to whether a non-human can be awarded patent protection has come before courts previously. Does the Thaler decision move us closer to a resolution? And, in its decision, did this district court raise any particularly interesting points, or bring about new issues when rendering their decision? Unravel that. I wouldn't stop talking, but I want to hear what happened and what you think.
Patricia Campbell:
Thanks, David. And the answer to your two questions there is yes, and yes. Let me unravel that a little bit for you, and it would be useful for me to give a wee background on the Thaler versus Hirshfield subject matter, which was an artificial intelligence system called DABUS, which was Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. This, in other words, was a creativity machine. It included a light beacon that flashes in a new and inventive manner to attract attention, and a beverage container based on fractal geometry. That was the invention. All right, so the patent applicant, Stephen Thaler, of Thaler in Hirshfield named DABUS, which remember, this is the device itself.
Dave Dalton:
Right.
Patricia Campbell:
Named DABUS as the inventor of his applications. Thaler obtained a South African patent, obtained an Australian patent and successfully argued, to an Australian court, that the Australian Patents Act should be flexible in its interpretation of inventor-ship to include artificial intelligence, because such interpretation would promote innovation and further pharmaceutical research. In other words, Thaler was successful in convincing the Australian court that an algorithm could be an inventor, but it was a different story in the United States.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected Thaler's application, concluding that an inventor must be a natural person under the Patents Act. And Thaler then asked the US district court for the Eastern District of Virginia to vacate the US PTO's decision and reinstate his patent application. And that led us to the Thaler versus Hirshfield decision, so let's turn to that.
Dave Dalton:
Okay.
Patricia Campbell:
The court here, on motions of summary judgment, affirmed the US PTO's determination that an inventor must be a natural person, meaning a human being. Focusing on the plain language of the 2011 America Invents Act, which provided an explicit statutory definition for the term, inventor, the decision came down to the meaning of a single word, individual. What does an individual mean? This is the particularly interesting point, or new issues that were raised when rendering its decision. In this case, the court found that the meaning of individual, in previous Supreme Court decisions, meant a natural person. And in this case, they actually turned to litigation that involved, not a Patent Act, but the Torture Victim Protection Act.
And under the TVPA, Torture Victim Protection Act, the Supreme Court found that individual meant a human being. And in fact, if you take a look at other parts of the patent statute, individual is referred to as himself or herself, and in view of the Supreme Court precedents for the TVPA and other language in the patent statute, the court then found that Congress had a clear intent to reference the inventor as a natural person. And so, this decision though, I would say it was not surprising. I would say the Australian decision was surprising, but the district court decision still leaves unresolved how to obtain patent protection on innovations generated by AI systems.
Dave Dalton:
Right.
Patricia Campbell:
The US PTO summary judgment brief hinted at a potential solution, and that is the use of a machine, as a tool, by natural persons does not, generally, preclude those natural persons from being inventors or joint inventors, if they contributed to the conception of the claimed invention. And so, then the question becomes really whether human beings contributed to the conception of the claimed invention, which involves artificial intelligence. And it's really easy for us, as patent attorneys, to envision how that could be a natural person. Could contribute to the conception of an AI invention, if they designed the algorithm itself. If they contributed to the conception of design of the dataset used to train the algorithm, or the selection of the inputs for the algorithm, or the selection of the outputs of the algorithm that is the solution.
At the end of the day, the district court decision was not surprising. That is in line really with the rest of the world. For example, outside of South Africa and Australia, every other patent office in the world that has looked at artificial intelligence inventions, and particularly, the DABUS artificial intelligence application, found that the inventor must be a natural person and, in fact, rejected DABUS as the inventor. And that includes Korea, Europe, China, Japan, and others, so not surprising that DABUS was rejected as inventor in the district court. But surprising, I would say, that the district court turned to a Torture Victim Protection Act to define the meaning of natural person.
Dave Dalton:
Yeah. I wouldn't have expected that. You were kind enough to send some notes over before we started recording. I was looking at that. I thought you never would've thought that somehow might come into play. Artificial intelligence isn't going away, and the technologies is, probably, just going to advance and you know it will. Does the law catch up somehow? Mr. Thaler says he's going to appeal, so what will his grounds for appeal be likely?
Patricia Campbell:
I'm not sure about out his grounds for appeal.
Dave Dalton:
Okay.
Patricia Campbell:
I would bet money that I know what the result of the appeal would be.
Dave Dalton:
Okay.
Patricia Campbell:
The federal circuit will affirm the US district court's decision that an inventor must be a natural person, because that's really consistent with the rest of the world, other than Australia and South Africa. And I just want to have a side note here that Australia and South Africa really don't examine patent applications. I mean, that is absolutely true for South Africa and, I would say, in Australia, it's a little bit more of a proforma examination. So it doesn't surprise me that those countries are two outliers. But my expectation is that algorithm will not be an inventor going forward, I'm not surprised by that. But you're absolutely right, David, that one of the things that's exciting about patent law is that it has to track technology.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It's a huge thing, not only in the high tech space, but in the pharmaceutical space. And everybody is asking themselves, what does it mean to be an inventor? What does it mean to be a person of ordinary skill in the art? And what does it mean for an invention to be non-obvious or to have inventive step, when an algorithm is involved? There's a lot of questions out there. And quite frankly, we'll probably have to wait until the courts resolve them. And it's not yet quite right, but these things are winding their way up through the courts, and the DABUS case is just the first of many.
Dave Dalton:
Okay. Patricia, without giving away the secret sauce or anything, if you were advising Mr. Thaler, how does he protect himself, or the work that DABUS did? What are his options?
Patricia Campbell:
Yeah, it's a really good question, David. Quite likely... I'm not in possession of all the facts of the case. Quite likely, Mr. Thaler is actually the inventor on this, and a simple thing for him to have corrected inventor-ship to change DABUS from inventor to Mr. Thaler as inventor, whether it was when the applications were, in fact, pending. And the various patent offices, in this case, the US PTO, or if, in fact, that application ever issued. inventor-ship is an easy thing to correct. Personally, I think he wanted to make a point. So I think it's more flash than subsubstance in this case, but it's certainly not a problem, or viewed as a problem, by those out there, whether it's a pharmaceutical company, or a high tech company, or an autonomous vehicle company. They're not concerned that they won't be able to figure out who the inventor is. And my advice to them is to continue to look to human beings as the inventors who contribute to the conception of their claimed inventions.
Dave Dalton:
Okay. It's interesting. You just used the term human being right there, because I was getting nostalgic. Meredith, does this remind you of one of our first podcasts? Does this remind you of the monkey selfie thing somehow? It's preposterous, I know, but there's some weird connection I'm trying to make. Help me here. Are these types of cases, or the line of thinking with applying law, is it at all close? And if you want to summarize the monkey selfie case for people, go ahead, but I'm sure they're familiar. But I'm just wondering, is there any applicability here?
Meredith Wilkes:
It's interesting that you tie the two together, Dave, because our good old Naruto, the monkey in the selfie seen around the world, it was one of our early podcasts where we were talking about the Ninth Circuit decision in 2018 involving copyright rights to the pictures that Naruto took of himself that ended up in a book somewhere else. And the Ninth Circuit resolved the issue by saying that good old Naruto didn't have any standing to bring any claim, because to be an author, under the US copyright laws, you had to be a human being. And so there are some similarities here. That neither the monkey nor the machine can be an author under our current framework for copyright laws. But Patricia raised a point in the Thaler discussion that I think applies in the copyright context, as well. And we see the language also from the Ninth Circuit in the Naruto case, which is this idea of contributing to the conception of the claimed invention.
In the monkey selfie case, the Ninth Circuit talked about how the human authorship requirement, under the copyright laws, allows corporations to be copyright owners and concluded that it's okay that a corporation, i.e., a thing, can be an owner, because the corporation is formed by humans. And so, I think the language leaves open the possibility, in the copyright context, that maybe the creator of the AI software could then be the author of the work that the AI creates, so circling back the concept that Patricia raises about contributing to the claimed invention. But short of some overhaul, I think by Congress and the courts, were not there yet. But interesting that Naruto returns in 2021 to our discussion.
Dave Dalton:
We almost got through an entire year without him coming up again. We went all the way until mid-December. And that's what we're doing today, year-in-review, Women in IP, this is Jones Day Talks Women in IP. We're going over the year-in-review for intellectual property law, focus on trademark and patents. Sarah Geers, thanks for being here today. One interesting development, it's actually very late 2020. But late 2020, the USPTO launched Patents for Partnerships. This web-based intellectual property marketplace providing a platform for patent owners to list patents available for licensing in the field of COVID-19 technologies. Again, I missed this when it happened, so I just learned of this when we were preparing for this program. But Sarah, this sure sounds like a win for everybody involved. Can you explain how all this works?
Sarah Geers:
Sure. Hey, Dave, it's great to be here with you.
Dave Dalton:
Glad to have you back.
Sarah Geers:
And I also find this fascinating. There has definitely been a lot of interest in intellectual property related to COVID-19 technologies, as we've all heard about through the course of the pandemic. And this is one way that the US Patent Office has come up with to try to promote licensing of various COVID related technologies. And so, it's basically set up like a matchmaking service. It's not a pooling or pledging system, like some of the other intellectual property proposals that we've heard about related to COVID pledges at the WHO, for example. But it does set up a database on the US PTO website, where folks who want to license their COVID related technology can list it. And then those who are interested in taking licenses to that technology can search for and find it.
It's really just a nice searchable database platform, where the two parties can find each other over the internet. And so, initially, it was populated with information that was already available on public websites, and in the US PTO official Gazette, where they typically post things that are available for license or sale. But since then, it's grown, as people have found out about it, and a number of additional patents have been added for searching.
Dave Dalton:
Got to be a lot of potential value there for the right party. If someone else has a patent with real world tangible applications, and it's just sitting there, it's nice that something like this happened, right?
Sarah Geers:
Yeah, exactly. And there's a range of parties who have put up their licenses, or their patented technology, or patent applications for licensing. It does seem to be getting interest from lots of different places in the relevant industries. And it covers things, not just the vaccine technology that are subject to some of these other proposals, but also diagnostics, treatments, and even devices, like ventilators and pieces of ventilators. All of that posted there and is available to post there. So as of right now, as of today, I looked today, there are 912 patents and applications that are listed there. And compared to other types of platforms that have tried this before, in terms of setting up databases for licensing, this is a really successful project. Usually they haven't had this degree of traction in the marketplace, so it's really nice to see everyone coming together and using this technology to try to address what is obviously a very serious public health issue. And it's great that the USPTO was able to provide that.
Dave Dalton:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I imagine most of the interested parties, life science companies, maybe other tech companies, and occasional venture group, maybe, but who's showing up on the site, I'm wondering?
Sarah Geers:
Well, there's the traditional biotech companies, but we also see entities affiliated with the US government that have done a lot of the basic research. That's the foundation for many of these technologies. It really is all the way from the venture capitalists, you're talking about, to the type of technologies that you and I, and everyone have helped support through the federal government.
Dave Dalton:
Sure. Patricia, I was hoping you'd weigh on this one also. It sounds great. Are there potential risks involved with someone, or a company, an entity, an institution, whoever that might consider getting involved with this platform?
Patricia Campbell:
Yeah, there are some potential risks. I mean, it's a great platform, but you want to be thoughtful that, as Sarah mentioned, it is a matchmaking platform. One of the things that appeared to us, when we took a look at it, is that the USPTO doesn't seem to select these patents or exercise control over which ones are listed. It's a voluntary listing platform. And if you take a look at the 912-some patents and applications that Sarah mentioned in the database, there are certainly some that turn up that appear unrelated to COVID, at least, on their surface. And some commentators have suggested, and this might be a little bit more their thinking and less our thinking, but they have suggested that this system, I'll call it P4P, for short. The system is being used as a free marketing opportunity or more cynically, perhaps, as a means to discover new targets for patent infringement lawsuits, or contentious out licensing opportunities, so potential risk.
And I guess our advice is that should a client be interested in one of these 912 or so patent assets for purchaser license, consider having a third party reach out to the asset owner, and that third party instructed not to divulge the client's name. Because you don't want to tip your hand too quickly to a potential competitor, because they're out there on a platform advertising their patents for licensing.
Dave Dalton:
Great, great point. Let's go back to Sarah for a second. Someone mentioned the PTAB earlier. We're going to talk about proposed legislative changes. In particular, Sarah, back in June, the US Supreme Court held that PTAB judges are unconstitutionally appointed. Now, I won't faint ignorance on this. We actually did an entire podcast on this very subject with Matt Johnson, another partner here in the firm, back in June. We have some background. We know what happened. In fact, we will link to that podcast, if anybody here listening wants to hear Matt's take on it, just after this all happened. But Sarah, can you fill us in on what's happened since?
Sarah Geers:
Sure. Yeah. And I'm not surprised you had a whole podcast on this issue, because it was obviously a very hot topic in 2021, and there's still more to come from it. To give folks a quick recap on that decision, in Arthrex, the Supreme Court decided that, as you said, the PTAB judges are unconstitutionally appointed, and that they needed to function as inferior officers in order to be constitutional. And so, what the Supreme Court decided was that the statute that prevented the director of the patent office from reviewing decisions on his or her own made the APJ's role unconstitutional. The remedy was to allow the director to review those decisions on his or her own. And so, that's been the direct result in the PTAB of this decision. And so, now the PTAB has set up some interim measures to put that into effect, where the PTAB director can either review a PTAB panel's decision sua sponte or patent owners or petitioners can request review by the director, similar to the current rehearing procedures that apply for the PTAB panels.
The interesting point about this type of review by the director, and as a consequence of it being a constitutional requirement, the director's review is de novo. And so, they get to look at the record and decide the issue from scratch, which I think is a new feature that people will latch onto for purposes of the review by the director. And the director can even request additional briefing on issues that may not have been fully explored in the panels. The idea is that the director has an independent, fresh review.
Dave Dalton:
Okay, good. That's what we're doing for now. That's the interim fix, if you will. Let's go back to Patricia. Anything happening on the legislative front to address the underlying issue of unconstitutionality?
Patricia Campbell:
Well, I'm not aware of any bills that are coming up. Though, it's early days, maybe Sarah can speak to that. But in general, comments for members of the House Judiciary Committee have suggested a couple of possible legislative solutions, and Sarah already mentioned one of these. And that is to create some mechanism by which the US PTO director could review or overturn PTAB decisions well before they're issued, or I would say after they're issued. And I think this is consistent with the PTAB having set up some interim measures to request review by the director, similar to the current rehearing procedures.
Another suggestion that was made by members of the House Judiciary Committee is to give review authority to the PTAB's chief judge, and make that position a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate. That would create a new panel of Senate confirmed judges within the board to review decisions, or making all of the boards, hundreds of judges, subject to Senate confirmation. They're not easy fixes.
Dave Dalton:
No.
Patricia Campbell:
But these are the things that are being discussed right now in the House Judiciary Committee.
Dave Dalton:
We'll certainly keep an eye on that. Obviously, nobody does PTAB like Jones Day. I'm not just saying that. We publish a lot. We do podcasts on, at least, a quarterly basis. And of course, there's the PTAB blog that Matt Johnson runs for the firm. I mentioned Matt earlier, and he runs that ship. And that blog's update, at least, twice a week, all sorts of content. And there are rumors that, that's where people go first. Before they even check the PTAB site, they go to the Jones Day PTAB litigation blog. It's great information, so anybody out there with some interest in that content go to ptablitigationblog.com. Sarah, let's pick that up though. Any other PTAB legislative proposals percolating right now that we ought to keep our eye on?
Sarah Geers:
Yeah, Dave. And funny you should mention the PTAB blog, because the first big legislation I want to talk about, we've authored a couple of articles on the PTAB blog discussing it. And so, folks want to find out more detail on that it's right there analyzing it.
Dave Dalton:
Well, good.
Sarah Geers:
I'm referring to the Restoring the America Invents Act proposal that was put forth by Senators Leahy and Cornyn a couple months ago. And, as Patricia just mentioned, one aspect of that proposal is to codify some of the interim measures related to the Arthrex decision to keep the director review procedure that's been put in place and to make that permanent. That's one proposal in that, we'll call it the RAIA. There are all sorts of other things, proposals that have been making waves in there. And basically, the net effect of those would be to increase the role of the PTAB in the US patent system.
And as you've, I'm sure talked about with Matt, that's already a pretty large role, but this would also expand it. A couple of the proposals, for example, are expanding the grounds available for inter-parties review petitions, to include double patenting, both statutory and obviousness-type double patenting, which would be a new feature. It would also create appellate standing for third parties who have filed PTAB challenges. As you probably know, as well, right now, if you aren't the patent owner, and haven't been targeted for potential infringement action, you don't have standing to seek appellate reveal, and so this would change that. There's also a proposal in there to modify the PTAB estoppel provisions, because right now, by a quirk of the legislation, if you're the winner at the PTAB, you can still face estoppel in district court, and so this would also fix that quandary.
Dave Dalton:
Okay.
Sarah Geers:
But there's also Fintiv issues in there. I'm sure you've also discussed Fintiv, but it would basically overrule Fintiv, and say that the PTAB can't deny institution based on the Fintiv factors, only if there's arguments that were previously prevented to the patent office. That would also have a pretty significant effect on current PTAB practice, if that went forward. Everything in that Restoring the American Invents Act proposal is pretty friendly to patent challengers and less patent friendly than the current system. As you can imagine, certain industries and groups have lined up in favor or against some of these provisions.
Dave Dalton:
Sure.
Sarah Geers:
On the other hand, we have a second piece of proposed legislation. This one called Restoring America's Leadership and Innovation Act, that was proposed by Representative Massie. And that would, essentially, roll back the entire America Invents Act, so this one is quite fascinating, because it proposes to return the US to a first-to-invent system, to abolish the PTAB, to establish the best mode requirement again, to basically undo all of the jurisprudence on section 101 that has developed in recent years, and to do all sorts of other new things, to basically increase the rights of patentees. And so, this is obviously a direct response to everything that's happened as a result of the AIA.
Yeah. It's pretty dramatic. Not surprisingly, because there's so many proposals that are drastic changes from what we have now. It doesn't have bipartisan support. It doesn't seem likely to go anywhere. But I do think it's interesting just to show the point that 10 years after the AIA has gone into effect, there are still people that want to go back to the old way of doing things, and so we'll see. We'll see what happens.
Dave Dalton:
We're not turning this into a hardcore political program. What's representative Massie's agenda? What doesn't he like? I thought PTAB was accepted as giant steps forward, and making the whole system more modern, and efficient, and farer, and all that stuff. Any idea where he's coming from?
Sarah Geers:
It is an interesting observation. All of the folks who have lined up in support of this proposal have come from the Republican side of the aisle. And so, I suspect it has something to do with the idea of being the more business friendly group in Congress. But I agree with you, I do think that these things are not so clear cut, in terms of how they affect various industries and commerce, in general. And so, it is interesting that one party has proposed this, and it's seemingly a bit more political than some of the other things we've discussed.
Dave Dalton:
Yeah. We'll keep an eye on it regardless. And we'll probably do another program in the spring, and we'll see if this has any movement at all, or adjusted, or if there's some compromise. But thank you for sending those notes over, Sarah, because I was completely unaware of this. Somehow I'd missed that one too, so I've got to up my game a little bit. I had no idea that was moving, although, as you said, probably chances aren't great that it goes anywhere, but it's still an interesting development. Well, hey panel, we did it again, but I would be remiss if I did not go back to Meredith Wilkes for a second to talk about Jones Day's Women in IP Initiative, and what the plans might be for 2022. Meredith, besides resurrecting the monkey selfie matter for the 400th time, what are you planning to do in 2022?
Meredith Wilkes:
I had a nice list for you, Dave, but then during the course of our discussion today on the podcast, I see you've given Women in IP a homework assignment, and Patricia, and Summer and I, with the rest of our committee, will be discussing as the number one agenda item in our next committee call, the royalty rate. We're going to be charging Matt Johnson for him to be able to link to a Women in IP podcast. I mean, we're talking Superbowl commercial royalty rates, I think, is really what's going to happen.
Dave Dalton:
Yeah, you need to work that out with him. But just, if it helped, and Matt's a huge fan of this group, and of these podcasts. But the Women in IP Podcast, in particular, so cut him a nice deal. How's that?
Meredith Wilkes:
The committee will revert on that in due course. But we've got lots to look forward to. I mean, we really just only scratched the surface during our podcast today about all the different things that we think might be happening in 2022. And of course, we're going to direct, at least, four CLE programs directed to that. We're going to start off the year doing our Women in the Courtroom Program. And this year, we're going to go Women in IP in the ITC. We'll do that in March. We'll do our June leadership offering. In September, we're going to talk about invalidity, and we're going to talk about patent invalidity, both from a US and a China perspective. That's going to be a really interesting talk. And then the fourth program will round out the year in November on brand updates.
Still uncertain as to whether or not we're going to be able to offer those in-person, at all, or if we're going to stick with purely a virtual format. Luckily, technology is enabling us to reach out to our friends, and colleagues, and clients and do these things virtually. And so, we're very happy and pleased that we're able to offer that and do the CLE programs, and there'll be lots of blasts on the coming year on those. But we do have a program on Monday, our fourth and final CLE program for 2021, led by Patricia, and she is going to be talking about artificial intelligence again, in the bio pharma life cycle. Still time to register for that, and you can email us at womeninip@jonesday.com, and get more information about what's going to be a really, really fabulous CLE program on December 13th.
Dave Dalton:
That was womeninip@jonesday.com. Well, I'm as big a fan of your group as is Matt Johnson, so whatever we can do to help, Meredith, you can count on us. But this has been another great program, and a great wrap to the year, so I really appreciate you, Sarah and Patricia being here today. You knocked it out of the park again, so thanks for your time today.
Meredith Wilkes:
Thanks so much for having us.
Patricia Campbell:
Thanks, Dave.
Dave Dalton:
You can find complete biographies and contact information for Meredith, Patricia and Sarah at jonesday.com. And for information on the December 18th event, or any other program sponsored by Women in IP, just email womeninip@jonesday.com. Visit jonesday.com for more podcasts, videos and publications, and subscribe to Jones Day Talks Apple Podcast. Jones Day Talks is produced by Tom Kondilas. And on behalf of Tom, Marsha Bryant, and the entire Jones Day content team, we hope you have a joyous holiday season and a successful 2022. As always, we thank you for listening. I'm Dave Dalton. We'll talk to you next time.
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