C4IP Coalition Updates: August 2023

C4IP was productive during the month of August! Here’s a roundup of what our Coalition was up to over the past month.

• September 28 will mark the one-year anniversary of C4IP’s launch. We look forward to many more years to come, dedicated to promoting strong and effective IP rights.
• On September 10, C4IP Co-Chair Andrei Iancu, C4IP Board Member Judge Kathleen O’Malley (Ret.), and USPTO Deputy Solicitor Farheena Rasheed will speak at the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO)’s Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. They will discuss how IP law is shaped by policymakers and courts — including their own roles within the IP policy system and how they interact with each other, Congress, and the public. Learn more and register for the event here.
• On August 29, C4IP Executive Director Frank Cullen issued a statement following CMS’s release of the first 10 prescription drugs subject to price controls under the Inflation Reduction Act.
  • “Today’s announcement marks a concerning turn for America’s intellectual property system. Allowing the government to determine the price of breakthrough medicines just nine years after their introduction — without regard to their remaining patent term — undermines the entire premise of the U.S. patent system and its ability to incentivize future innovation.”
• On August 29, C4IP Co-Chairs Andrei Iancu and Dave Kappos published an opinion essay in Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review underscoring how billion-dollar government prizes won’t improve on market incentives.
  • • “Congress does need to reauthorise the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act. But it should drop the misguided proposal to revisit drug development contests. Replacing our current system with a centrally planned regime of expensive government prizes wouldn’t promote innovation — it would squash it.”
• On August 23, President of Personable Inc. Benjamin Chou published an opinion essay in Forbes voicing strong support of the recently reintroduced Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA).
  • • • “The present state of patent eligibility in America is rife with uncertainty and inconsistencies…Facing these challenges, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 by Senators Thom Tillis and Chris Coons offers a promising solution. It aims to address the existing gaps in the patent system…”
• On August 20, C4IP Co-Chairs Andrei Iancu and Dave Kappos published an opinion essay in the Boston Herald arguing that Congress should not neuter the IP system by replacing patents with prize systems.
  • “Prizes were a fad hundreds of years ago. They did not work. All serious scholarship has demonstrated that prizes fail badly at incentivizing innovation, as compared to our tried-and-true patent system.”
• On August 14, C4IP Co-Chair David Kappos was featured in a BioWorld article that addressed recent proposals to replace drug patents with cash prizes.
  • “A recent bipartisan request for funding of a study on replacing U.S. drug patents with cash prizes is just one more symptom of a larger global malady that makes patents the scapegoat for bigger problems that have nothing to do with intellectual property.”
• On August 3, C4IP’s Board of Directors published an opinion essay in the Brussels Morning News arguing that the European Commission’s proposal to create a “Competency Centre” to govern standard-essential patents would actually stunt tech inventorship across Europe.
  • “Brussels’ plan would upend precedents that innovators have relied on for decades, raising uncertainty around whether patents truly grant meaningful rights, or are simply government favors that can be retracted or have their value reduced by bureaucrats under the political influence of more powerful corporate interests.”
• On August 2, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) published an opinion essay in the Delaware Business Times explaining how large companies have weaponized the PTAB against patent holders and what the PREVAIL Act would do to strengthen America’s IP system.
  • “PTAB has become a tool to wear down patent holders through serial challenges to their patents…[The PREVAIL Act] will reform the PTAB so that patent holders can get back to what really matters — innovation — rather than beating back constant challenges to their protected discoveries.”
• On July 24, C4IP and the University of Maryland co-hosted a roundtable, “Prince George’s County and The Innovation Ecosystem,” with Special Guest Congressman Glenn Ivey (D-MD). The event’s speakers — which also included UMD Dean Samuel Graham, Jr., UMD Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Dean Chang, venture capitalist Bob Nye, and C4IP Co-Chair David Kappos — discussed growing innovation in Prince George’s County. For more on the roundtable discussion, check out our press release and blog on the event, as well as the full transcript.
  • The event was featured in the Maryland Daily Record, Center Maryland, and the Washington Informer’s Prince George’s County political rundown.
• ICYMI: C4IP submitted written comments to the NIH in advance of the agency’s recent virtual workshop, “Transforming Discoveries into Products: Maximizing NIH’s Levers to Catalyze Technology Transfer.”
  • • Those within the broader intellectual property community also shared their perspectives with the NIH. Some highlights from these submissions can be found here.
• ICYMI: C4IP announced the creation of a grant program for intellectual property research, scholarship, and writings. The program — which provides grants of up to $25,000 — will advance C4IP’s mission to provide lawmakers data-driven recommendations to inform IP policy. More information about the application process is available here, and questions about the program should be directed to C4IP Chief Policy Officer and Counsel Jamie Simpson at jamie@c4ip.org.
• • • • The program has been covered by IPWatchdog, Legal Scholarship Blog, and SSRN.