Critics say patent troll is guided by money. It is a difficult task with many angles. A new front in the effort to improve how the tech world and the intellectual property industry are. Adapt is an acronym for Advancing Diversity Across Patent Teams and is meant to identify and address DEI issues in the intellectual property industry.
It is possible to link the worlds of diversity and inclusion with intellectual property.
DEI is a strong theme in the world of tech, which has traditionally not been great at inclusivity and has been trying to change that. The legal world is not easy to navigate. Microsoft assistant general counsel Judy Yee, who is involved in Adapt, said in an interview that the world of patent litigation acts almost like a force multiplier.
According to research done by the American Bar Association, 22% of patent attorneys and agents are women, 6.5% are racially diverse, and just 1.7% are racially diverse women.
The benefits of improving those ratios are important as a matter of doing what is right and equitable for all people and giving more people the knowledge and empowerment to realize those opportunities. As with the tech industry's wish to become more inclusive, it's about putting people in places to make decisions. It is important to represent that at the point of service building and provision.
Adapt thinks that the intellectual property industry is the same thing.
Micheal Binns is an associate general counsel at Meta and is overseeing the patent portfolio strategy for Meta's Family of apps.
One of the reasons LOT is interested in bringing this about is that it is one of the rare instances of cooperation and collaboration between companies that might otherwise compete fiercely against each other. It gives it a unique place to advocate for programs that can have larger ramifications.
The group will start activities in September. The idea is to give companies who want to build more DEI initiatives access to outside resources to do so. There will be a mentorship program for underrepresented intellectual property professionals. It will be building a platform for measuring DEI and sharing knowledge about that.
Adapt will initially be focused on the legal aspects of intellectual property, but there is an opportunity to extend that to inventors, those building products and bringing them to legal teams to help secure intellectual property claims.
She said that they decided for the first phase to focus on the patent profession, but a lot of their efforts went into that area. There is a way to get things done.
Although you don't hear a lot of patent cases nowadays, patent troll are still very much alive and well.
Ken Seddon, the CEO of LOT, used to work for companies like Apple, Intel andARM in patent litigation. The current economic climate, with inflation on the rise and the effects of the Pandemic, may lead those who hold intellectual property assets to make more efforts to enforce them, or they may sell them off to PAEs.
Patent reform for the high tech industry may have been given up on by the Supreme Court, White House and Congress. LOT has picked up 1,200 new members in the last two years, with companies including ByteDance but also a lot of smaller companies.
At Adapt, that feeds into the mission.
Binns said that they wanted to make it clear that a large company needs to tackle diversity. The push for more inclusion will help fight the misuse of intellectual property.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
