PTAB Whiplash and Uncertainty: Director Discretion and Policy Swings at the PTO

by Stephan Kinsella on February 15, 2026

Patent shill and buffoon Gene Quinn, of IP Watchdog, has a new podcast episode out:

Shownotes:

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed Gene Quinn speaks with Todd Walters and the two explore the current state of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practice and the growing tension among stakeholders as policy changes continue to reshape post-grant proceedings. Both emphasized that the most striking development in recent PTAB discussions is the intensity of opinion from patent owners and petitioners alike, reflecting the high financial stakes and strategic importance of AIA proceedings.

A central theme of the discussion was the lack of predictability in PTAB practice, driven largely by shifts in USPTO leadership and the exercise of Director discretion in administering AIA trials. Walters noted that changes in policies governing discretionary denials, real-party-in-interest rules, and parallel litigation considerations have made it difficult for practitioners to provide durable strategic guidance. Quinn and Walters agreed that without greater stability, the system will continue to experience “pendulum swings,” with each administrative transition reshaping PTAB access and outcomes in ways that undermine confidence in the patent system.

The discussion also addressed broader structural issues in patent dispute resolution, including serial challenges to patents, the emerging concept of “settled expectations,” and the complexity created by parallel proceedings across the PTAB, district courts, the ITC, and the Federal Circuit. Both participants suggested that meaningful reform will require patent owners and petitioners to work together to develop a more predictable and balanced framework for post-grant review. While consensus may not satisfy stakeholders at the extremes, establishing clear and stable rules would strengthen confidence in the patent system and reduce the cycle of policy reversals that has defined PTAB practice in recent years.

This is the genius who thinks patents should be issued to stimulate the economy, for example.¹

This guy rambles on and on all the time about patent “certainty,” to achieve “quiet title”–they hate the idea of patents being challenged. They so badly want patents to be considered a “settled” property right, though they are not.²

Quinn apparently the PTO to have a very liberal standard for issuing patents, and to make it very hard to invalidate them. Look, I have proposed getting rid of patent examinations altogether and moving to a petty patent system,³ but that means the patent has no presumption of validity so is less of a threat. Quinn’s approach would have patents examined and then granted—very liberally, it seems:

What we need to do is have President Obama issue an Executive Order directing the Patent Office to start allowing patents. A 42% allowance rate during the first quarter of 2009 is wholly unacceptable. … So while you are at it President Obama, order the Patent Office to issue a patent UNLESS there is a reason to deny it.¹

But also made difficult to challenge (as he wants to limit PTAB challenges etc.). Oddly, Quinn has also mused that a petty patent system might be a way to improve the “broken” patent system.⁴ It’s not clear if he understands that this would not result in patents to which you have “clear title” since the patentee no longer has some clear “property right” that can be used to attack innocent competitors, as it has not been examined yet or received a presumption of validity. Whatever.

In any case, it never occurs to these people that there is a reason patent validity keeps getting challenged back and forth and multiple times, unlike normal property rights where once the border of a tract is established it’s established. It’s because these are not natural property rights; not property rights at all.⁵ Rather they are nonsconsensual negative servitudes that block third parties from using their own property as they see fit⁶ based on the ambiguous terms of a “claim” that is granted based on totally non-objective criteria such as “novelty” and “non-obviousness.” There is no objective answer to whether a patent is valid or infringed or nonobvious, since these are all judgment calls based on non-objective criteria unrelated to justice or the normal function of property rights and to the function of scarce means to action–to serve as causally efficacious means of action which are physical, scarce resources in the world that are physically grasped and manipulated and which have objective, determinate borders defined in terms of their causally efficacious use and the very way that physical conflict can possibly arise.⁷ None of this applies to knowledge, which plays a separate and distinct in human action.⁸ Property rights in scarce resources reduce conflict and increase peace and prosperity; they make perfect sense and can be objectively determined; IP rights increase conflict and reduce wealth and cannot be objective. Naturally there is no way to prevent incessant legal battles over patent validity or infringement without simply having the law always favor patentees—which is exactly what Quinn and his ilk want. But do they really? I don’t think they would like a world like this—a world of constant permission; a world of enstrangling IP; a world of death.⁹ “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

ChatGPT summary/analysis:

Here’s what they argued, with the three points you want foregrounded—Quinn’s “settled/certainty” refrain, his “too many references” obviousness gripe, and his “hard-to-find foreign prior art shouldn’t count (much)” intuition.

I’m also folding in the angle from your draft paragraph (patent-shill “incontestable”/certainty rhetoric; patents not like real property), and pointing to your referenced posts as context. (C4SIF.org)

What the conversation is “about,” in one line

Quinn and Walters use the PTAB conference as a springboard to complain about instability and the alleged over-correction toward patent owners—while Quinn repeatedly pushes the idea that patents should become more settled/quieted/incontestable (or at least treated that way in practice), and that PTAB obviousness practice is too aggressive (especially multi-reference mashups and “late-found” foreign art).

1) Quinn’s repeated “settled rights / certainty / quiet title” whining (with examples)

A. “Quiet title” and “do it all at once”

Quinn explicitly says he’s been writing “for a decade or more” about the importance of quiet title—and he wants the system redesigned so validity challenges happen “all at once,” instead of repeated attacks.

Gene Quinn [14:14]: “I’ve written for a decade or more about the importance of quiet title.”
Gene Quinn [14:28]: “If [claims]’re not good, let’s get rid of them. But what I would like to do is… do this all at once.”
Gene Quinn [15:00]: “Those people just get crushed… [they need] to have title… know that they own it.”

This is exactly the “patents should be settled property rights” vibe your draft is calling out—trying to analogize patents to boundaries of a land tract (once set, set), when the whole problem is that patent “boundaries” are linguistic/interpretive and politically manufactured, not natural-property borders. (Your own framing: patents as nonconsensual negative servitudes on third parties’ property.) (C4SIF.org)

B. “Certainty immediately” (settlement pressure)

They acknowledge the current system incentivizes payoffs/settlements, but Quinn frames this mainly as a “certainty” problem rather than as an indictment of the state-granted monopoly structure.

Todd Walters [23:43]: “Lots of companies need to get certainty… immediately… [so they] reach a settlement…”
Gene Quinn [23:18–23:30] (paraphrasing the posture, but quoting his language below): patent owners “need rights… solid rights that we invest in…” while implementers fear empowering abusers.

C. Predictability / “whiplash” / pendulum talk (policy instability as the villain)

Quinn returns again and again to the theme that changing administrations cause “whiplash,” making advice unreliable and outcomes unpredictable—another version of “patents should be settled.”

Gene Quinn [30:07]: “Every time… [there’s] a change in administration… we have the rules changed…”
Gene Quinn [31:45]: “There will be a swing back…”
Gene Quinn [51:45]: “That’s where we’re at… it’s whiplash.”
Todd Walters [51:13]: “The biggest problem… is lack of predictability…”

This maps neatly onto your older “incontestable patents” critique: Quinn’s long-running instinct is to treat challenges as illegitimate “unsettling,” not as a predictable consequence of an inherently contestable state grant. (C4SIF.org)

D. “Incontestable status” as an explicit aspiration

Quinn openly floats the trademark-style idea: patents should become “incontestable” after some point.

Gene Quinn [37:32]: “Having some kind of incontestable status for a patent would be wonderful.”

That is basically your 2010 post’s headline complaint, applied in modern PTAB language. (C4SIF.org)

2) Quinn’s “limit the number of references” obviousness gripe (with quotes)

Quinn repeatedly complains about PTAB obviousness being too willing to stack references—suggesting (in spirit) that there should be some limiting principle.

Gene Quinn [21:46]: “I don’t like when they put together five or six… obviousness references…”
Gene Quinn [27:01–27:14]: “I don’t know that I ever saw a district court judge… combine more than three references… [but] at the PTAB… there doesn’t seem to be any kind of limit—whether there should be…”
Todd Walters [28:40] (pushback): “I don’t want the audience to think that happens a lot… I bet they’re rare.”

So Quinn’s position is: PTAB judges (often technically sophisticated) see “obviousness” too easily, and multi-reference combinations contribute to that. Walters tries to tamp it down (“rare,” sometimes necessary for long claims), but he doesn’t really rebut the normative claim—just minimizes frequency.

3) Quinn’s “hard-to-find foreign/Asian-language prior art” shouldn’t defeat patents (with quotes)

This is the most striking policy instinct Quinn admits: if the prior art is hard to locate (foreign language, especially character-based Asian languages), he’s sympathetic to still granting/protecting the patent—because it “wasn’t really knowable.”

Key moments:

Todd Walters [17:34] sets the hypo: “That art… in Chinese… you spent $10,000 to find…”
Gene Quinn [18:23]: “If it’s so hard to find… so late arriving… how could that… [make it] obvious?”
Gene Quinn [19:14]: “Searching… Asian languages… character-based was just impossible…”
Gene Quinn [20:43–20:50]: “If it’s that hard to find… why should we say… somebody can’t protect it here in the U.S.?”

He even defends the older nationalist frame (rewarding importation/bringing tech “here”) as historically intelligible:

Gene Quinn [20:07–20:20]: old U.S. law didn’t care about “known or used… outside the U.S.” because the system aimed to “reward people for bringing it here.”

That posture fits your draft’s critique: it’s an admission that “validity” is being shaped by policy goals (stimulus/national advantage / administrability), not by a principled property-right boundary concept. (And it echoes your earlier “patent stimulus” criticism.) (C4SIF.org)

How this plugs into your draft paragraph (suggested framing)

If you want to sharpen the blog-post punchline using their own words, the cleanest “exhibits” are:

Quiet title / incontestable aspiration: “importance of quiet title” (14:14) + “incontestable status… would be wonderful” (37:32).
Anti-obviousness-combination sentiment: “don’t like… five or six” (21:46) + “whether there should be [a] limit” (27:14).
Foreign-art excusal: “Asian… character-based… impossible” (19:14) + “why… can’t protect it here” (20:43).

Those three together nicely support your thesis that they’re trying to convert a politically contingent state grant into a “settled” property right—and, when necessary, they’ll even relax the supposed objectivity of novelty/obviousness by treating hard-to-find prior art as less disqualifying.

If you want, I can rewrite your draft paragraph into a tighter, publication-ready block that tees up these three “Exhibit A/B/C” moments without adding any paraphrase of the transcript beyond short quoted fragments.

Also, re Sixth Annual Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB) program:

Survey on Patent Quality

Here’s a concise summary of that early portion of the discussion about the PTAB conference panels and the informal “in-house panel” poll:

PTAB Conference Panels (Intro)

Early in the conversation, Gene Quinn and Todd Walters reflected on the recent PTAB Masters 2026 program that they had just concluded (referenced on ipwatchdog.com). They noted:

The virtual event drew strong attendance, showing high interest in PTAB developments.
There were multiple panels, including former PTAB judges, and significant engagement from the audience.
A recurring theme across panels was how passionate participants are about current PTAB issues—with some attendees strongly supporting recent changes and others strongly opposed.
Quinn remarked that the passion and emotional investment he observed (including heated chat comments) were higher than he expected, given the stakes for patent owners and petitioners alike.

In-House Panel’s “Informal Poll” on Enforcement Inquiries

During the event, one of the panels was composed of in-house corporate counsel or in-house IP representatives. Quinn described an informal discussion they had about how often patent enforcement inquiries involve patents that are:

Low quality, or
Not closely related to the target company’s business

According to the panel’s responses:

About 50–60% of enforcement inquiries they see involve patents that appear to be low quality or not really relevant to what they do.
The remainder (roughly 40–50%) were described as more legitimate disputes where the patent owner’s complaint could reasonably be seen as valid, even if contested.

Gene Quinn’s Reaction to the Poll Results

Quinn’s reaction focused on his surprise at how high the percentage was for low-quality or irrelevant patents:

He said he thought that was exactly the type of abusive situation the PTAB was supposed to address, and so he expected that percentage to be lower by now.
He emphasized that he was a little surprised at how large a share of claims were considered “abusive” or disconnected from the accused’s business, noting that this was a continuing problem despite nearly 15 years of PTAB practice.
His broader point was that even with PTAB reforms and challenge mechanisms in place, a large proportion of enforcement inquiries still center on patents that many practitioners view as poor quality or misaligned with the accused technology—which he found noteworthy.

If you want, I can also pull out direct quotes from the transcript and tag them with time stamps aligned with this summary.

Transcript (youtube/ChatGPT)

Intro: Show overview (IP Watchdog Unleashed)

[0:10] Hello everyone. Welcome to IPWatchdog Unleashed, where each week we journey into the world of intellectual property to discuss the laws, news, policy, and politics of innovation, technology, and creativity. With analysis and commentary from industry thought leaders and newsmakers from around the world, IPWatchdog Unleashed is hosted by world-renowned patent attorney and the founder of IPWatchdog.com, Gene Quinn, who has twice been named one of the most influential people in the intellectual property community and recognized numerous times as one of the top IP strategists in the world. Take it away, Gene.

Guest introduction: Todd Walters; PTAB conference context

Gene Quinn [0:45]: Thanks, Renee, and welcome everybody to this week’s edition of IPWatchdog Unleashed. This week our guest is Todd Walters, and Todd is a shareholder with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, where he’s the firm’s chair of the Patent Office Litigation Practice Group and he’s co-chair of the IP section. Todd is also currently vice chair of the Post-Grant Practice Committee for the IPO, and he is a past chair of the PTAB Trial Committee for the AIPLA.

So Todd, it’s good to have you here, and it was great to have you join us for our annual PTAB conference, which we just concluded. We had a pivot to online, which was great. We had over 760 people—was the final number—registered. So, a lot of interest about the PTAB going on right now.

So we’ve got a lot to cover, but let’s just start with: during the last few days when we’ve been together, and we’ve been talking about this, and we’ve been getting ready for this program over the last, you know, six or eight weeks leading up to this, and then we had these great conversations—was there anything that came up that surprised you? I mean, you do this every day. So I wonder sometimes whether there was anything that was interesting or unique in what you heard, and if so, what that might have been.

Todd Walters [2:00]: Well, first, Gene, thanks for having me today. It’s great to get a chance to talk with you about the conference. You know, thinking back and listening to all the sessions, which I did, I think the thing that jumped out at me the most—which was a surprise I didn’t see at previous conferences—is how passionate everyone is about what’s going on at the PTAB right now. You see people that are thrilled with the changes that have occurred, and you see people who are very upset about the changes that have occurred, and it’ll be interesting to see how things proceed.

Gene Quinn [2:35]: Yeah, the passion was really palpable sometimes. I think in the chat it got a little bit too heated in retrospect. I think most people—like 99.9% of everybody—was cordial, difference of opinion, but there were a couple times when it felt like it was, you know, I don’t know how to characterize it.

Because there’s so much at stake, right? There’s been so much at stake for inventors for a very long time who have thought that they were on the short end of what was going on at the PTAB. Now the tables are turned a little bit maybe, and I was not expecting quite that level of emotion.

Todd Walters [3:17]: Yeah. You know, it’s not surprising because, you know, if you’re a patent owner and your patents are being challenged and you feel like there’s repeated challenges on the patents, I understand where they’re coming from. And on the other side, I see that petitioners now, they see that maybe the PTAB’s dead to them. And that’s a problem going forward with people who are having to face lawsuits on a regular basis.

In-house panel takeaways: abusive assertions; cost pressures

Gene Quinn [3:47]: Yeah. And the one thing from the in-house panel that we had that I thought was interesting—maybe eye-opening, maybe not surprising—but I asked them, how many of the enforcement inquiries, for lack of a better way of saying it, do you see that have either a patent that is really very low quality or maybe a patent that doesn’t relate at all to what it is that you do? And the answer we got was between 50 and 60% of what they see is that. And then maybe 40 to 50% are legitimate grievances—that they maybe see it the same way the patent owner sees it—but that there is not that obvious abusive situation.

I was a little surprised maybe how high the abusive situation is still, because I thought that’s why we got the PTAB in the first place.

Todd Walters [4:43]: Yeah, it was a very high number. I was surprised by that myself. And litigation’s really expensive. And even if it’s someone that ultimately is looking for a settlement, just getting to the point of settlement can cost hundreds of thousands certainly for a company, and sometimes millions of dollars. And that’s why petitioners are really upset right now with the changes that are occurring at the PTAB.

Petitioners vs patent owners: Todd’s mix; former-judge panels

Gene Quinn [5:08]: Yeah. So let’s take a step back a little bit, and I want to go deep and dive into what’s going on at the PTAB from the petitioners’ perspective, because you represent mostly petitioners. Correct?

Todd Walters [5:20]: I represent patent owners on a regular basis, but I do represent petitioners for sure.

Gene Quinn [5:26]: Yeah. Is it like half, 50/50? Is it two-thirds/one-third? Not to hold you to it—just to give the audience.

Todd Walters [5:33]: Yeah. Probably 60% petitioners, 40% patent owners.

Gene Quinn [5:38]: Yeah. Okay.

All right. So, the panel that—and I just shared this with you right before we went live—the panel that had the highest attendance was the one that you moderated, and it was—we had over 550 people there for at least a portion of that conversation. And it was one of two former PTAB judges panels that we had. But we had to have two panels because we had so much interest from former judges to come.

One, do you think the former judges were so interested in speaking this year? And maybe let’s just start there to begin with, because it’s not that we don’t do well with former judges—and maybe this surprises a lot of people—I do have pretty good relationships with most PTAB judges. Very cordial, and they’ve been very generous with their time, both when they were on the PTAB—come to speak—and now that they’re in private practice, most of them. Some of them retired. They come and speak as well. But we had, what, 10 or 12 of them want to speak this year.

Todd Walters [6:43]: Yeah, it was great. You know, the judges that were on the panel that I moderated—Chief Judge Boalick, Deputy Chief Judge Bonilla, Vice Chief Judge Tierney, and we had Terry Rea, who was the former interim director at the Patent Office—they’re not shy about speaking. They weren’t shy when they were at the Patent Office, and certainly now that they’re not at the Patent Office, I don’t think they’re going to be shy going forward. So that wasn’t a big surprise to me that they would be willing to speak.

And, you know, I thought they presented answers to the questions that were posed in a fair way—that they just wanted to get information out based on their perspectives. In the second panel, same thing. We had some judges that we haven’t seen at your conferences in the past, and they were the same way—just trying to get information out, you know, according to their viewpoints. And I thought that was great.

Gene Quinn [7:48]: Yeah, I thought it was very good, too. And I think I would characterize them as probably uniformly not in favor of the direction the PTAB is going. Is that sort of what you were hearing from them?

Todd Walters [7:54]: I think so. I think there are some things that they approve of and there are some things that they don’t particularly like. But I think they were respectful in the way they were giving their viewpoints and presenting the information.

“Patent death squad” perception; PTAB stats; serial challenges

Gene Quinn [8:23]: Yeah. No, I thought so too. The one thing I thought that they—a couple of them in particular—I won’t call out any names. I don’t have a transcript in front of me, so I don’t want to attribute this to somebody who’d wind up not being the person that said it—but I think there was several of them that were very interested in making sure that the audience knew that it’s their perception that the judges are not trying to kill patents. They’re not going into this, maybe, and I maybe fall prey to that over time.

When the PTAB starts, the idea was to get rid of these bad patents, so it doesn’t surprise me that you would get judges who would come in and be looking for bad patents when that was the whole reason why we started the PTAB. But they were very adamant about: they’re just calling balls and strikes. Now, you might not like their calls. And we did get into some conversation throughout the conference about obviousness, which is one of my pet peeves at the PTAB. But that was one thing that definitely came out loud and clear.

Todd Walters [9:33]: Yeah. You know, I’ve been practicing before the Board for more than 35 years now. And I have great respect for the judges at the Board, and they try and go in every day and do their job, which is to follow the law.

And when AIA came out and there were high institution rates and there were high rates where claims were found unpatentable in cases, they got referred to as the “patent death squad,” right? That was pretty sensitive to them. And I tried to, during the panel, get them to say, you know, are these criticisms fair?

And what I constantly hear is, you know, this high rate of unpatentability found at final written decision—where it’s over 80% of the cases have claims that are found unpatentable. And, you know, if you think about it: the few cases that actually go to the PTAB, and then the cases that don’t get instituted, and then the cases that settle—and then you keep going down the stream—how many cases are whittled out before you get to that final written decision number of claims that are found unpatentable? It’s not much different than district court proceedings.

Gene Quinn [11:00]: And you and I have had this discussion in the past, and I’m sure we can banter and not necessarily see eye to eye on it, but I do understand.

So the frustrating thing for me has always been: I don’t think the PTAB stats are done in the best way. I think that is sort of—you remember when we were in law school and they’re like, okay, you have Westlaw and you have Lexis, and I forget which one—I think it’s Lexis—gives you everything and you have to sort it out on your own, and Westlaw kind of gives you a little bit more of a curated view of things. I feel like that’s sort of what goes on with the PTAB stats. They kind of give us a little bit more of a curated view and not necessarily give us all the information.

So the big one that has always interested me is that the Patent Office historically considered a settlement a win for the patent owner. Now I can get there, because I understand what they’re saying is, well, you didn’t lose the claim—but that’s not a win for the patent owner. And it becomes very difficult to know: what is a win, what is not a win? And you have these settlements that are confidential, and licensing agreements. And so I get it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do.

But the one thing that just always irritated me is: and this is going back a few years, maybe even more than just a few years, but where you would have—from the patent owner’s perspective—if you file a challenge against the patent and they have, let’s just say, 10 claims, and you’re able to take out two of those 10—okay, well, that’s 80% of the claims still last, right? Well, then the next person takes out another two—well, they only lost 20% in that case. And then the next person takes out another two. And then pretty soon, with some of these ones that were challenged over and over and over again, you wind up with no claims left, but the math was like, “Oh, well, each time the patent owner won 80%.” It’s like: well, how did they wind up with zero at the end?

Todd Walters [13:11]: Yeah. I think, you know, early on there were some problems with serial petitions where one party might attack the claims, then they might try and attack the claims again, then attack the claims again. Or a first party would attack the claims, and then that case would be over, then a second party would attack the claims, that would happen.

But, you know, the PTAB really cut down on the ability to do that through discretionary denials. And they really tried to solve that problem so that a patent owner was not facing all these serial petitions. I think they did a pretty good job with it.

Quiet title; “do it all at once”; notice and fairness

Gene Quinn [13:54]: They certainly—it got better over time for sure. And I’m told now that that is not the problem that it was. Maybe it’s not even a problem at all.

I do still really like the idea—and this gets back to: I’ve written, people are probably sick and tired of me talking about it—I’ve written for a decade or more about the importance of quiet title. And I just don’t think we ever get there. But I would love to have a system because—and you and I, we just had this conversation—you’re like, “So, are you saying that if the claims aren’t good, then they shouldn’t be?” No. No. If they’re not good, let’s get rid of them.

But what I would like to do is do this all at once. And there’s a couple reasons. One, from the patent owner’s perspective, I think it’s important that they have something that they can invest in. And I’m not talking about the real trolly people. I couldn’t care less about that. Actually, I wish they’d crawl under a rock and just die, because they’re making the system bad for everybody.

But if you have somebody who—some of them their business is innovating, their business is research and development, or they’re actually doing something, they’re just smaller—those people just get crushed in this whole system. I think it’s important for that group of people to have title, know that they own it, and actually have ownership. It’s not to say that the Patent Office can’t make mistakes there. They do. You want to strive for perfection, but perfection in any system is just unrealistic.

From the administration of justice standpoint, I also would prefer the Patent Office to not have to constantly look at these things over and over again. I would love to live in a system where we’re going to challenge this patent. We’re going to look at it. We’re going to open it up. If you have a point of view, now’s your time to come and talk about it.

And I also—and I’m going to throw a lot on the table; you can pick what you choose you want—but I would be happy to also have an asterisk that said, “Well, you had no reason to know when this patent owner got the patent that it was going to be interpreted that way to come after you.” I think we should allow for challenges in that situation where there really—there’s notice. Because, yeah, these patents are published, everybody knows about them, but was there real notice that you had to be worried about that patent? And sometimes the answer might be no. I think most of the times it would be yes, but I’m sympathetic to that.

So there’s a lot on the table there. And I know one of the things we wanted to talk about—I asked you to think about in advance of this—is, well, what would you do to try and make it better, streamline it? And I think that would be one thing I would do. What would you say?

Serial petitions by different parties; “better art” (including foreign-language art)

Todd Walters [16:22]: Yeah, you put a lot on the table there. I’ll—well, let’s first talk about serial petitions by different parties. Take the case where I’m the patent owner and I decide I’m going to sue five different companies, and one company has no means to really defend it, and I go after them first, and they just do a terrible job with an IPR proceeding, and they lose. I keep my patent. Then I go after some others, and maybe the third party I go after is a larger corporation, can do a better job in defense. Should they not have that opportunity to file an IPR proceeding just because I sued someone else first?

That’s the question petitioners are asking. And maybe that’s okay with discretionary denial if you’re just going to use the same art and make the same arguments. But what if I found better art? That art that you talked about last week that’s in Chinese—you spent $10,000 to find—shouldn’t that third company have the opportunity to challenge the patent like the first company that was sued had an opportunity to challenge? I throw that back to you first.

Gene Quinn [17:48]: So I think the answer is maybe the squishy lawyer answer. I mean, yes, I think that they should. Now, the question is whether that goes on in perpetuity, because this may get us into a conversation about what is obvious at some point in time. Maybe we’re not there yet, but with AI, AI should be able to find everything. The AI searches right now are really, really good. And if it’s so hard to find this and it is so late arriving, then how could that possibly have been contributed to this having been obvious? And I realize that that’s not what the law says. I get that.

But what I’m trying to think about is: what are the ramifications of all of this? And it seems to me at some point in time it either was something that people knew about and would have perceived to already be in the prior art and known, or it wasn’t. And if it wasn’t, then it shouldn’t be obvious in my viewpoint of the world.

And so I almost think—and I did say and I have said this before—I don’t like the fact that, you know—and now that the systems have gotten better—but once upon a time searching for Chinese art, not exclusively Chinese art, but any of the Asian languages where they’re character-based, was just impossible to do.

Well, in the past when we didn’t have AI, you had search firms that had people who spoke the languages and could read and search the art, and you could find that art and then get it translated and still use it. It’s certainly easier now with AI, but those options were always available, and companies who had resources did it. They did. And I realize I’m not in the envelope of where the law is, or even where the law ever was.

But I do think if you go back to the very beginning what patents were about, and pretty much as far as I can tell every country that’s adopted a patent system has started off being nationalistic about it, right? And even in the U.S., the old 102—102(a)—you know, if it was known or used somewhere else outside the U.S., we couldn’t care less. What we were trying to do is reward people for bringing it here. And I realize that makes a lot more sense when you’re talking about going across the Atlantic in a boat and it takes you four weeks to do so than it does in a world where there’s planes and certainly internet, where things move around the globe in milliseconds.

Now, it does seem to me that there has historically been this nationalistic, maybe economic aspect to the patent system. And I just don’t know that if it’s that hard to find, if it’s that difficult to locate, why should we say, well, somebody can’t protect it here in the U.S.? And maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe I’m totally out to lunch. But I do struggle with that.

Because I also think in the world we live in today now, practically everything could wind up being obvious. But that’s a much bigger issue than what’s going on at the PTAB. I mean, that’s a fundamental change in the law of obviousness, right?

Right now the judges are just trying to follow the law, and quite frankly the cases that go on appeal to the Federal Circuit, they’re affirmed I think 84% of the time, right? And there’s been very few PTAB decisions that I’ve actually pointed to and I say I think that that was wrong. I think there’s only been a couple.

I don’t like when they put together five or six obviousness references, but I realize that’s the law. I cannot like it but realize that, well, I don’t really have a leg to stand on. I just don’t like it. I don’t think that’s the way it should be. Generally petitioners don’t like making those arguments either for that very reason, because oftentimes those arguments are found not valid, right?

What is PTAB “for”? NPEs, low-dollar settlements, and systemic gaming

Gene Quinn [22:02]: So the question, I guess, that what I’m trying to think about this whole thing is: do we really know what we’re trying to do with the PTAB? And the reason I phrase it like that is because we clearly are not trying to go after the patent trolls—because those group of people, whoever they are, however you define the bad actors, the abusive party—those are the people that have been pretty much unscathed by the PTAB, business as usual.

And the other thing that shocked me from the conferences is now the number is like: if they’re asking for $100,000, they’ll pay that because that’s just too much to even retain a law firm to look into this. And that to me is like, oh my God, have we really got to the point where if somebody’s going to shake you down for $100,000, you’re just going to go and do it? And I don’t want to sound like I’m throwing the implementers under the bus, because I get the economics. I understand how expensive this is. But, boy, that sucks. If that’s the system that we have, that sucks, and we’ve got to do something about that.

So what is it that we’re trying to do? It seems to me that we haven’t really defined that. And that becomes where you get such passion, because the patent owners are like, well, we need rights. We need solid rights that we invest in and we can understand. The other side say, if you get that—if we were to give these abusers that—we’re done for.

Todd Walters [23:30]: Yeah, for sure. That is a big problem. Not all companies cave even for minor amounts, which is good for the system. Sometimes it’s good for the company because they get a reputation of they don’t cave on these and they’re going to fight it out, and then they’re not the target next time.

But yeah, lots of companies need to get certainty. They need certainty immediately, and the most expeditious way to do that is to reach a settlement with these companies—with these NPEs—and that’s a problem.

Gene Quinn [24:08]: Looking back, I’m trying to remember what were we really trying to accomplish with the AIA. And I know there was some specific things: we wanted to change from first-to-invent to first-to-file, and want to create a PTAB that has a system for challenging patents that’s easier to use and quicker than the inter partes reexamination, which was just an abomination really. I mean, nobody liked that. It was complicated and slow, which is just a terrible combination.

What I thought when we first started having those conversations, we’re going to be looking at streamlining the patent system—not just getting the patent, but the dispute resolution system. And I think part of the problem that I have—and this is not the judges’ fault on the PTAB, it’s just the whole system—I think the system is set up very poorly. I mean, you have the ITC, you have the district courts, you have the PTAB, then you have the Federal Circuit, and review from different of those tribunals goes up on different standards and different timing and different speeds—and there’s different speeds even within the district court system, wildly different speeds—and it just seems to me that that system is set up to almost not just encourage but support gaming.

Todd Walters [25:19]: Yeah. Well, it’s definitely a complicated system. You can be in a lot of different forums at the same time, or at least you—in the past you could be in a lot of different forums at the same time—and that’s problematic in terms of cost for companies.

It’s also problematic for patent owners who don’t have funds because it’s very costly to litigate in the Patent Office, let alone in the ITC and in the district court, and then go on appeal to the Federal Circuit and potentially three different proceedings. So, yeah, it’s definitely a problem. It’s definitely not streamlined.

But originally, I agree with you. I thought that we were trying to create a law to address non-practicing entities. Back in the day, people referred to them as patent trolls, right? But that’s not what Congress put in the statute. They made it much broader than that. And you know what? AIA applies to much more than NPEs. And now there are industries that are very critical of AIA because of it.

Obviousness and multi-reference combinations; experts; rarity of “5–6 references”

Gene Quinn [26:34]: And I also think that this disparate system, for lack of a better way of explaining what we have, lends itself to why you have petitioners have had, I think, a good run at the PTAB and patent owners have not had a good run at the PTAB and been very upset about it.

Because I do think that when—particularly like with the issue of obviousness, for example—I don’t know that I ever saw a district court judge anywhere combine more than three references. There’s probably somebody can probably find a four-reference case, but usually it’s two or three when you’re in the district court. And at the PTAB, obviously two or three is the petitioner is a much better case, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of limit—whether there should be or there just isn’t.

And so I think what you see is—and this perhaps is just not shocking—when you are hiring highly qualified—did they hire highly qualified litigators who had good solid scientific backgrounds to be the first group of the PTAB judges—many of them had PhDs, many of them were very sophisticated scientifically. Well, for that group of people, there’s a whole lot of things that look obvious that wouldn’t look obvious to certainly a lay jury or even a district court judge who was a history major or economics major.

So it frustrates me that I do feel like we get this different treatment in different venues. And then there’s the fight, and then that’s led to the TC Heartland line of cases where you got to go here—which I’m not sure that what that has mattered. I mean, I hear so many people complaining, “Well, we still have to go to Texas.” Well, I just wonder whether we’re in this place with the whole system where when we try and solve for something, we hit it like it’s a mole, and we hit that mole down back into the hole and it pops up somewhere else.

Todd Walters [28:32]: Yeah. I want to go back to this five-, six-reference obviousness arguments. I don’t want the audience to think that that happens a lot. In fact, I can’t remember a case where I worked on where that was argued either by me or against my client. I’m sure there are some cases like that, but I bet they’re rare.

And there’s probably some rare cases where there’s just fundamental combinations that are so obvious that, yeah, you might need to put four or five references together to build a claim that’s a page long.

So the one thing that I did hear over the last week or so as we’re doing this is that sometimes when you get these cases where there seems like an outsized number of references that are put together, the petitioner may be doing that in order to not need to have an expert witness, or so that some of it is more foundational.

Gene Quinn [29:36]: Now, if that’s the case, maybe I don’t have as much a problem with that.

I suppose I’m—I like the direction the PTAB is going right at the moment. I’m not sure I would do exactly what they’re doing in terms of the implementation, because I do worry that there’s going to be a backlash.

Here’s what I see as the biggest problem. And again, I represent petitioners, I represent patent owners. The biggest problem that we have right now is: it seems that every time we have a change in administration at the Patent Office, we have the rules changed or we have the policies changed. So you hire me today and I can give you the best advice today, and when you implement that today and then ultimately decisions are made two years from now, it may have been the worst advice ever.

And we’re seeing that with a lot of different areas: discretionary denials; how to apply Fintiv factors—you know, with Director Iancu it was one way; it then changed; now it’s changing back; real parties in interest—that keeps changing back and forth; the impact of whether a matter is in front of the ITC or not—that changes back and forth.

And we’ve got to get people together. We’ve got to get patent owners and petitioners together and come up with a system that works for everyone. It might not make people on the far fringes happy, but it has to work for everyone so that we can give both patent owners and petitioners some predictability and certainty going forward.

And as I see it right now, the pendulum has been pushed really far now in favor of patent owners. And there will be a pushback in the future. And that’s just going to hurt this issue of predictability.

Predictability vs whiplash; 101 analogy; “core concepts” undefined

Gene Quinn [31:42]: Well, that’s the only thing that we could predict with great confidence, right? I mean, there will be a swing back. There always is a swing back. And it seems as far—the further you go one way, the faster and harder it swings back the other direction. And so I do worry about that.

But one of the things that just as you were giving that answer, you were saying that came to mind is a big issue that I’ve always had—and this is not PTAB related, it’s more 101 related. The key terms for 101, like “abstract”—what is an abstract idea? We have never had the term “abstract idea” defined. The Supreme Court has never described what is the difference between a natural phenomenon and a natural law. In fact, they’ve said they don’t have to. You know, these are just core concepts that we don’t even know what they mean.

And that’s what strikes me as what you’re saying—like, well, this term means this when Director Iancu was there. It meant this when Director Vidal was there. And now it’s going to mean something different than either of those now with Director Squires. And that can’t be. There has to be. And maybe this is where I get all upset about it. And it’s not, again, upset at the judges. I’m upset at the system. And they unfortunately represent the system. You know, they’re one of the frontline workers. So I think sometimes they probably do take way more criticism than they deserve because they’re just working the system that we have.

But if we can’t agree on what these fundamental concepts mean, then how the hell can we ever apply them consistently?

Todd Walters [33:17]: Yeah. I view it differently, and I don’t view the interpretation of the law as the problem necessarily. I think it all comes in with the director’s discretion to implement the proceedings in the way the director sees fit. And every time we get a new director, that’s going to change.

So a lot of these things are policy type things. They’re not necessarily how they’re applying the law. They’re using their discretion no matter what the law says.

Gene Quinn [34:00]: Well, I don’t know that I would agree with that, but I think we’re like on two sides of the same coin. I mean, because I think what they’re doing is they’re using their discretion to say, “Oh, okay. I think this means that and that’s what we’re going to do.” But that was kind of splitting hairs. I think we fundamentally agree it’s the discretion issue.

“Settled expectations” and timing; statutory design vs director discretion

Todd Walters [34:18]: Yeah. I’ll give you an example. We now have this issue of settled expectations where it’s perceived at least now that if a patent has been issued for more than six years, that it’s an uphill battle for a petitioner to get an institution.

The statute is pretty clear that you have nine months to file a PGR, and Congress put that in the statute with a time period. For IPRs, it’s very clear that there is no time period for when an IPR can be filed. However, through director discretion, the director is now saying that there is settled expectations if a patent has been issued for more than six years, and therefore I’m not going to institute on a patent that has been issued for that long.

So that is, in my mind, not an interpretation of the statute. That is the director using his discretion even though the statute is pretty clear that there’s no time limit that Congress intended for the filing of an IPR.

Gene Quinn [35:35]: Yeah, I would just disagree a little bit, and I think this actually makes your argument stronger. I think there is a time limit in the statute, right? It’s the enforceability period of the patent, which would be not just through the life of the patent—that would be plus six years. Yeah. You know, because I think it’s the same—it’s in the statute. It’s the same as for reexamination, right? That’s true. You can challenge a patent that is expired if it’s still enforceable. And I’ve been involved in a case where that has happened, and the Federal Circuit has agreed that that is available to petitioners.

So I get that people don’t like this idea of settled expectations on the petitioner side. I mean, I like it, but I think it needs to show some work. You need to show your work. Why is there settled expectations? And I get where the six years comes from. That has to be related, although I don’t think they’ve said it explicitly, it has to be related to the statute of limitations.

But there are all kinds of other things that I think legitimately petitioners could point to and say, “Well, why did that person have settled expectations?” You know, they got this patent, they weren’t doing anything with it, then somebody bought it, and now they started doing something with it. We didn’t have any reason to know. And I’m not a fan of that particular argument, but that’s the system that we have, right?

We don’t have an opposition system which is “speak now or forever hold your peace” like we do to some extent on the trademark side. It’s not perfectly “speak now or forever hold your peace.” But if you wait too long on the trademark side, then it becomes extremely difficult to challenge the trademark once it’s become incontestable. But there’s a process in place, right? And then it’s not impossible to challenge it. It’s just you lose most of the easier challenges. Now you’ve got to prove fraud, for example.

I’d be more comfortable with sitting down and having that conversation because I do think having some kind of incontestable status for a patent would be wonderful. I think that would be great. But let’s define what that means.

Todd Walters [37:39]: Yeah. I agree. And I think that’s where patent owners and petitioners have to get together and come up with a system that will work for the majority of everyone and not just the fringes.

Congress oversight and “snapback”; incentives to compromise

Gene Quinn [37:54]: I agree, and I hope patent owners hear this and will do this, because I can just hear them in my ear right now saying, “Well, why should we?” You know, we feel like the petitioners have had this 15-year run and it was all on their side. “No, now we’re in control.”

I think you need to do this, patent owners, because you don’t want to have that snapback, because there’s going to be—as far as I’ve been told—there will be hearings in this Congress this year. Maybe not specific oversight hearings where this is the issue—PTAB is the issue—but there will be general oversight hearings where this is probably 80% of what they ask about, and there will—the PTO funding—where this is probably going to be something, you know, 80% of the questions are going to be about this.

So to think that this is not on the minds of members of Congress is foolish. It is. And when they start hearing from more and more operating companies, they’re going to want to do something about this at some point in time. And the snapback is going to be significant, I fear.

So I think we have this opportunity where if we can get the sane people in the room—and by that I mean the 80% in the middle—because to some extent, if the 10% on one side and the 10% on the other side, if they don’t like it, it’s probably a good deal.

Todd Walters [39:21]: Yes. Yeah.

Todd’s PTAB path: from interferences to IPR/PGR

Gene Quinn [39:26]: But so there’s a lot there, a lot of interesting ties. But how did you even find yourself doing PTAB work? I mean, because this is fairly new. You didn’t start your career doing it, right?

Todd Walters [39:38]: No. I’ve been practicing for, like I said, over 35 years now. And I really started out in an IP boutique doing some patent prosecution, a small IP boutique. And then after a period of time I ended up at a larger IP boutique, Burns, Doane, Swecker & Mathis, where I had the opportunity to do interference work. And most of my practice through the end of Burns, Doane, Swecker & Mathis, and then when I joined Buchanan, was patent interference work. I would say 90% of what I did was interferences.

And that was work before the Board. The preliminary motions phase of an interference were very similar to the process you use for IPRs and PGRs. So it was a natural progression for me when AIA came out to do PTAB work.

Gene Quinn [40:43]: Yeah. So you were one of the few people that actually did interferences. It was a very small practice area or bar. Did you call—I’ve heard it referred to as the interference bar?

Todd Walters [40:48]: Yeah. You know, back then the Board had a trial section, and there were on average maybe 15 Board members that were part of the trial section that handled interferences. And as far as interference practitioners, there were less than 20 people in the country who did them regularly. And I was fortunate enough to be able to do it.

I loved the practice. It was a lot of fun. You got to sink your chops into the case and spend a lot of time with it and really learn the technology. There was a lot of strategy that went into the cases. It was a lot of fun working on those cases.

High-stakes science: Nobel-winning technologies

Gene Quinn [41:43]: Yeah. And those mattered to both parties equally, right? Because they’re fighting over: we want these rights. So that probably had to be very exciting from a business perspective as well.

Todd Walters [41:49]: Yeah. You know, it was a lot of pharmaceutical and biotechnology cases mostly along the time. And I had the opportunity of working on three different Nobel Prize-winning technologies.

Gene Quinn [42:04]: Oh my goodness.

Todd Walters [42:06]: So, you know, I got to meet some of the most interesting scientists in the world through that practice, and it was a lot of fun.

Interference practice culture: deadlines, professionalism, and practical reforms

Gene Quinn [42:15]: The interference practice, as I understand it, was what I would call kind of loose. There you had to do things by a certain time, but the judges would allow the parties really to kind of dictate the schedule. Is that fair to say, or how would you characterize it?

Todd Walters [42:36]: Judge McKelvey, who had great influence on the interference practice—Fred McKelvey—he would always say, you know, I don’t want this to be a “gotcha” type of practice. And he would definitely reach out to practitioners. He called me a number of times and said, “Here’s what we’re thinking. How can we improve the practice?”

And where they ultimately came out on this was: they had deadlines that they wanted to meet, but the parties could work together on the schedule to come up to that ending point in the case. And it worked out pretty well because the bar was pretty cordial. Most of the practitioners were up against each other regularly in cases. So you would always try and do the right thing because if you didn’t it would come back and haunt you in the next case.

So I wouldn’t say it was loose, but it was a system that worked, and it worked for the Patent Office as well because we always met their deadlines.

Gene Quinn [43:46]: Yeah. And it’s interesting you say that. I just hadn’t thought about this for a very long time. But when I first started practicing, I did general litigation at a firm for a few years. And I remember in our engagement letters, the client had to agree upfront that it was up to us whether we extended a courtesy for scheduling purposes to the other side. And obviously the way it was always described to me is: you kind of—you never know. I mean, you might get sick, your kid might get sick. I threw my back out, you know, and it’s like, can we push that from today until next week? And usually the answer is sure. It doesn’t really much matter. You find a day that works for everybody over the short term here.

But sometimes in district court litigation, that’s not how it goes. I mean, there are no accommodations. And I just—I don’t think that’s the way to live. And it certainly makes things a lot more contentious.

Todd Walters [44:48]: In the interference days, we loved it when we had an opponent who was just a district court litigator that was dabbling in interferences because we would get those responses: “No, I’m not giving you any extension at all.” Or we’d have a call with the judge and the judge would immediately say, “Why not?” Right. And it just makes the other person look bad.

Gene Quinn [45:13]: Yeah. I think we’ve had on this stage Judge Tierney had talked about things like that. It’s like: how are you going to be prejudiced?

Todd Walters [45:18]: Yeah. If you are going to be prejudiced—maybe you are, maybe you think you are—just articulate that, and then they factor it in. The Board was very practical.

And I remember the days where they came up with a new standing order in the interference practice, and again Fred McKelvey was pushing this. And the story goes that they made all the deadlines at 5:00 p.m., and people were wondering—well, midnight’s when you have to file things, right? And he said, no, we’re going to make 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

And I understand that he had a daughter or daughters that were paralegals, and the lawyers would always wait until the end of the night to file things, and his daughters would have to go—or he heard about paralegals had to go—and file things late at night, and he thought that was wrong. So he made the deadline at 5:00. You know, it’s very practical.

PTAB procedure today: closer to interferences than district court (but scaled)

Gene Quinn [46:18]: Yeah, it is. And it’s always—and I guess I get it. It’s human nature, right? When we were doing litigation, you could tell even in a contentious case that you didn’t think was necessarily going to settle: if this case is going to settle, it will settle at or near midnight the day before jury selection is starting at 8:00 a.m. That’s just the way that it goes. It’s never going to be early. It’s always going to be at the edge of doom. And I never liked that part of the practice. I guess it crystallizes the mind, but it’s unnecessarily difficult.

So let me ask you this. Talking about this: is the current PTAB practice—and not the stuff we had talked about like the human part of it, you know, the opponents, the judges, the witnesses, all that sort of—is it more like the interference practice was, or is it closer to what district court litigation is?

Todd Walters [47:20]: I would say it’s still procedurally more like the interference practice. You know, the model was the interference practice for IPRs and PGRs, and I think it’s still that way.

The interaction, I think, between the judges and the practitioners may not be as close because there’s so many more judges now and so many more practitioners that you didn’t get the constant interaction and know the likes and dislikes of each and every individual judge like you did back in the interference days. So that may be a little bit more like district court proceedings.

Streamlining ideas; stays pending IPR; costs; parallel proceedings

Gene Quinn [48:12]: Now it’s an interesting time. I think we’re still trying to figure out what it is that we want to accomplish with the PTAB, and that’s one of the things that makes it—

It was, I think, in the minds of a lot of people, this is going to be faster, cheaper. I don’t know. I guess it’s cheaper. I don’t think it’s as inexpensive as people hoped it would be. I think it’s fast in some cases, and maybe people don’t like how fast this actually has become.

But I think I would like to see it become more of an adjunct to litigation where, you know, like if you have—the PTAB becomes more almost like special masters. And not to demote them or anything—that’s not what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is: if I’m a district court judge, most district court judges are not patent litigators—I think there’s only a couple that are—and I’m not even sure the couple that were patent litigators were scientists or engineers.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a system where you have the judge who handles the law and the courtroom and all of that, and then you had a group of people who could take a second look at the patent and do it all at the same time, all at once. And much like in the bankruptcy situation, usually the district court judge signs off on the bankruptcy judge’s decisions, but they do review it, and if they see something they don’t like, they can kick it back and say do a little bit more here, explain a little bit more there.

I think this system is begging for streamlining. And I think that there are some obvious ways that could happen.

Todd Walters [49:48]: Yeah, I don’t know if that would reduce costs to do it that way.

Gene Quinn [49:54]: No, I don’t think it would. But I mean, how much has cost been—how have they been reduced? I would say AIA has increased costs of litigation. So that’s why oftentimes it’s running in parallel, right? So let’s—like, I would say: okay, the whole idea that we’re going to do it cheaper, it didn’t work out. So maybe we should just try and do it better.

Well, maybe handle validity issues first. If you have a resolution on validity, then you don’t have to go through the rest of trial. But patent owners are going to hate that.

Todd Walters [50:25]: Yeah. You know, if all the district courts stayed their proceedings pending the outcome of an instituted IPR, that would save a lot of litigation cost.

Gene Quinn [50:36]: It would. And I know patent owners are going to hate that. I’m not in love with it either. And the reason I’m not in love with it is because I think, again, that would just allow for more gamesmanship like we already have.

Well, there’s at least one company, probably a couple of them, that they won’t fight this war of attrition. They’re not going to pay anything until they absolutely positively have to. If you didn’t have that to worry about, then I think you could make an argument: we can maybe come to some agreement. But it’s the people who take advantage that make coming out with a better system so challenging.

Closing: predictability; final thoughts

Todd Walters [51:13]: Well, again, the biggest problem in my mind is lack of predictability, and we’ve got to get everyone together and come up with a system that works for everyone, even if it doesn’t make everyone on the fringes happy.

Gene Quinn [51:31]: Right. Right. Well, you’ve heard—I’m sure—Judge Rader says, you know, a predictable rule that you don’t like is better than an unpredictable rule that you sometimes might like.

Todd Walters [51:39]: Yeah.

Gene Quinn [51:42]: Yeah. Because you just can’t—and that’s where we’re at with the PTAB. Like right now, it’s whiplash.

Todd Walters [51:48]: Yeah. And that’s no way to run a system.

Gene Quinn [51:52]: Yeah.

Todd Walters [51:52]: We can’t continue to do that. And patent owners, you know, right now they’re in the driver’s seat of IPR proceedings for sure.

Gene Quinn [51:59]: Yeah.

Todd Walters [52:00]: But it’s not going to stay that way forever.

Gene Quinn [52:03]: No. No.

Well, Todd, this was a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming in and having this conversation with me today.

Todd Walters [52:10]: Yeah, it was fun for me, too. Thanks for having me in.

Gene Quinn [52:12]: Thank you for listening to IPWatchdog Unleashed. We will be back next week, and we hope you will join us again. In the meantime, please be sure to visit IPWatchdog.com to read all the latest news and information about what is happening in the intellectual property world. And also be sure to subscribe to our free daily email newsletter.