The
U.S. Senate on Monday confirmed former Google executive Michelle Lee to
head the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a position that has been
vacant for more than two years. President Barack Obama’s choice was
approved by an unrecorded voice vote in the full Senate, just over a
week after the Senate Judiciary Committee gave the nod to her
nomination.
The
Alexandria, Virginia-based federal agency has more than 12,000
employees whose main role is to determine which inventions deserve a
patent. The agency had gone without a confirmed leader since David
Kappos, a former IBM Corp executive, left in February 2013.
Lee,
a former deputy general counsel and head of patents and patent strategy
at Google, had been the acting director of the office. She started with
the agency in 2012 as the first director of the patent office’s Silicon
Valley outpost.
The
agency has been a focus of Congressional efforts at patent reform aimed
at curbing patent litigation in federal court. The patent office has
been criticized for approving what some say are weak software
related-patents that have formed the bulk of the litigation.
Robert
Stoll, a 29-year veteran of the agency and its commissioner of patents
from 2009 to 2011, said Lee’s main task will be to improve the quality
of patents granted by the agency.
“Assuring
better quality patents will help blunt the patent troll problem,” said
Stoll, now a partner at the law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath in
Washington, D.C., using a term some use for companies that profit from
patent lawsuits instead of making products.
Another
complaint has been the agency’s long backlog in examining patents. In
December 2011, the unexamined backlog was almost 722,000 patents. It
currently stands at 602,265, according to the agency’s website.
The
Senate on Monday also approved Daniel Marti to be the White House’s
intellectual property enforcement coordinator, otherwise known as the
“IP Czar.”
Posted by : Gizmeon
No comments:
Post a Comment