The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) should consider...
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) should consider the “public interest” in future patent decisions, said Charles Duan, Public Knowledge director-Patent Reform Project, and Rashmi Rangnath, director-Global Knowledge Initiative, in a blog post Thursday. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman’s veto…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
last week of an ITC injunction that would have banned imports of early-model Apple iPhone and iPad products reaffirmed that “the public interest has to be a central concern in decisions about technology policy,” Duan and Rangnath said (http://bit.ly/11PACij). Froman’s written decision urged the ITC to “examine thoroughly and carefully on its own initiative the public interest” any future cases that involve standard-essential patents (SEPs). The Apple ban “would have cut consumers off from access to phones that are significantly cheaper than the latest models of iPhones, effectively raising the prices for a significant market share of smartphones,” Duan and Rangnath said. “A ban on their import would have been particularly unjust given that Samsung’s patented technology made up only a small part of the many technologies in the iPhone 4.” SEPs more generally “should not be the only thing, or even the most important thing that determines what is in the public interest,” they said. “The ultimate determinative factor must be the public’s interest in access to valuable and beneficial technologies whether or not those technologies are approved by a standards board."