STRONGER Patents Act 2019 - An Even Bigger Fraud

On August 22, 2019, Ambassador John Kenneth (“Ken”) Blackwell wrote an article entitled Congress Must Stop The Erosion Of Patent Rights.  Making reference to the proposed STRONGER Patents Act of 2019 sponsored by Steve Stivers (R-OH), Bill Foster (D-IL), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Chris Coons (D-DE), he argued that ‘inventors’ should enjoy more unquestioned ‘rights’ and that the Patent Trial Appeals Board (PTAB) should be “reined in” as they were invalidating “over 75% of patents issued by the USPTO.”  Ambassador Blackwell is on the wrong side of history…again.  You might remember this masonic Ohioan from his infamous role as Secretary of State of Ohio during the controversial election of George H. W. Bush when he said of a court ruling against his bigotry that he would rather go to jail that follow the court’s order.  He must have forgotten that Masonic (he’s a Mason) values include honor and integrity.  But then again, he’s a Fellow of The Family Research Council – an organization that has never let honor or integrity stand in its way.

You probably don’t care about patents.  I doubt you have given them a moment’s thought today.  But you should.  You are currently paying a tax to a broken innovation propaganda machine to the tune of an estimated 12.6% in many of the products and services you purchase.  And its fair to say that over ½ of that tax is flowing to companies and individuals who have defrauded the patent offices and, by extension, you.  So, put bluntly, you’re being robbed.  And the worst part of it is the U.S. Government and its global counterparts are not only complicit – they KNOW that it’s happening and choose to do nothing.

Whether it’s the PTAB, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, or ‘second-set-of-eyes’ patent examination – the facts are tragic.  With just a second opinion, close to 70% of the patents that are granted by the world’s patent offices are deemed invalid.  Imagine what would happen if 60-70% of the dollars in your wallet or in your bank account were counterfeit.  How long would you put up with that?

Ambassador Blackwell, Representative Stivers and Foster and Senators Cotton and Coons are dead wrong.  But its not just the STRONGER Patent Act of 2019 that’s the problem.  It’s the issue I addressed in last week’s blog post regarding propaganda.  Since 1981 when Japan eclipsed the United States in legitimate patent filing, the U.S. Government’s official response was to liberalize the criteria for getting patents.  This resulted an order of magnitude increase in patent activity.  Did we get smarter?  No!  We got better at stealing, lying, and plagiarizing.  And while it’s popular to blame the Chinese for ‘stealing’ innovation, where were the politicians when Siemens’ and GE executives stated that they took innovation from universities because “universities don’t have the legal war chest to fight them,” in 1997 at RSNA?  Where were the politicians and industry associations when the (dis)Honorable Gerald J.Mossinghoff – former Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of the USPTO – told an audience in Washington D.C. that if, “you bring me someone else’s patent and a check for $50,000, I can get you the same patent”?  Where was Congress when UPSTO Commissioner Q. Todd Dickinson comfortably stated that his job was not to ensure patent quality but rather to “get his customers their patents.”

We’ve gone nearly 40 years making the fraudulent patent the foundation of our “knowledge economy” illusion.  Foolishly, naïve countries like Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom and the European Union have decided that it’s better to play ball than to hold up quality standards.  Not surprisingly, the weight of the World Bank, the OECD, and every national initiative to build “knowledge economy” businesses have suffocated nascent innovation under the bloated ‘entrepreneur’ enablement interventions rather than building vibrant economies flourishing with transformative ideas.  Tragically, with the exception of the Kingdom of Denmark – yes, the one that won’t sell Greenland to Donald Trump – no other country has been willing to call the bluff underpinning the Propaganda Economy’s leading currency – the fraudulent and plagiarized patent.  And now a Conservative Republican is chiding Congress to defend the system his generation contaminated beyond repair.

It used to be that I was simply a locust eating, sackcloth-wearing prophet when I testified in Congress at the Patent Quality Hearings in the early 2000s.  But times have changed.  By measuring the quality that the Ambassador, Congressmen, and Senators patently ignore, M·CAM has succeeded in out performing the equity markets with our indexes and funds since 2013.  And while academicians, economists, and legal apologists all seek to count patents in their Monopoly game while ignoring the multiply confirmed counterfeit majority of these artifacts of manipulation – not invention – our indexes and our funds show the value of separating the truth from the fiction.  And regrettably, if STRONGER Patents gets passed, our performance will likely improve.

You don’t care.  When you pay too much for food, medicine, smartphones, appliances, cars, voice-recognition customer service, building materials, seeds and so many other things, you don’t know that this theft is truly OUR PROBLEM.  And the ignorance born of our confusion in believing that we’re increasing ‘knowledge’ while in reality being constrained by curated propaganda paralyzes us in the face of the tyranny of messages like those spouted by Ambassador Blackwell.  Do you care?  Share this and last week’s blog post in as many circles as you can.  See if someone somewhere offers a counter-message to the Ambassador’s before Congress takes us back to the Dark Ages.

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