US FTC Patent Troll Report and Proposed Patent Reform: Impact on Innovations

US Federal Trade Comission’s Patent Assertion Entities Report and Proposed Patent Reform: Impact on Innovations

On Oct. 6, 2016, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published a report on patent assertion entities (PAEs). The FTC’s 2012 report recognized harms on innovations resulting from PAE’s activities and identified poor quality patents as a main source of the harms. The new report examines how PAEs are structured and conduct business to understand impact on innovations caused by different types of PNEs and propose to reform U.S. patent litigation in line with German litigation. This presentation will give a summary of the report and discuss U.S. government’s anti-patent troll policies with respect to the measures implemented in response to the 2012 report and the reforms proposed in the 2016 report.

Speaker Biography
Prof. Toshiko Takenaka is a Washington Research Foundation/W. Hunter Simpson Professor of Technology Law at the University of Washington School of Law, Seattle, USA. She has received a visiting professorship to teach a course at Technical University of Munich 2016 fall semester from the state of Bavaria. She has served as the Director of Center for Advanced Study and Research on Intellectual Property (CASRIP) at the University of Washington School of Law between 2003 and 2015. She is on the board of editors for Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice and a member of Intellectual Property Committee within Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’ Industrial Structural Council.
Prof. Takenaka received LL.B. from Seikei University and LL.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington School of Law. She was a visiting scholar with the Max Planck Institute for Domestic and International Intellectual Property in Munich, Germany, and a visiting professor at Waseda University. She currently holds a visiting professorship at Tokyo Medical Dental University, Osaka Institute of Technology in Japan and University of Strasbourg in France. She has extensively published in the field of comparative patent law and is a frequent speaker for academic and professional seminars focusing on patent law.