Joff Wild Speaks With Dudas at IAM

Joff Wild, editor of IAM Magazine and author of the IAM blog is providing a preview of his interview with former USPTO Director Jon Dudas. As expected, Dudas claims to have "no regrets" over his 6-year tenure, stating that "[d]ifferent industries and different sectors always have different priorities, and that is where disagreements occur.”

Some notable quotes:

On the continuation rule changes

"We were very interested in what the user community had to say and there was a long discussion period; as a result dramatic changes were made to the package . . . Policy changes have to occur in order to make the system more efficient – and these rules change proposals came almost directly from the examining corps, which was worried that people were gaming the system.”

On patent quality

"We always had the same way of measuring quality and that was to ask if the patents we were granting were new, useful and non-obvious. The numbers we got indicated that under these criteria quality actually increased dramatically . . . I don’t know how to argue with people who say that quality has gone down because the numbers just do not support this.”

On the PTO Director having "real world" patent experience:

“Why don’t they ever say the Director should have examination experience? The one thing I was really aware of when I started was that I lacked this background and it was something I had to understand, but no-one ever seems to think this is an issue . . . You have to think of all constituencies – applicants, the public at large, the examiner corps, Congress, the administration, foreign patent offices and so on. I imagine that any group you ask would want the person in charge to have a background like theirs, but it’s just not possible.”

Read part 1 of the interview here.