Fordham and quality patents: what do you think?

This Kat is already looking forward to next month's Fordham IP Conference, which takes place on 4 and 5 April at the university's Law School in New York.  He has written before about its exuberant, no-nonsense atmosphere and about how participants have the chance to focus sharply on the relevant issues while disregarding the padding and the intellectual flab that choke so many conferences elsewhere. When you only have, say, ten or fifteen minutes in which to say your piece, and your audience consists of judges, practitioners, scholars and people who know as much about the subject as you do, if not more, you have to make sense -- and make sense fast -- or you waste (i) your own opportunity to say your bit and (ii) everyone else's time.

As far as he knows -- and the best-laid plans of mice and men have been changed at a moment's notice by Fordham impresario and compere Professor Hugh C. Hansen
(right, as usual) -- this Kat is participating in two panels, dealing with EU trade marks and designs -- and is also speaking on the topic of quality patents. It has long been this Kat's contention that, while no-one opposes the notion that patents should be of good quality, discussion of the subject has been hampered by the following considerations:

• there is no single agreed definition of the concept of "quality patent";
• the term has different meanings when viewed from the perspective of patent proprietors, administrators of the patent system, litigators and investors;
• the notion of the quality patent may also vary as between different technologies;
• there is a three-way relationship between cost, time and effort which must be properly understood before we can decide whether, even if quality patents can be defined and created, we really want them.

Readers' thoughts on this issue are welcomed, since this Kat has yet to write his paper (there's a long plane journey ahead!) and also, more significantly, because like many people who have been around a long time, he finds his own ideas so comfortingly acceptable and persuasive that he can easily overlook the arguments of others.

If you'd like to comment on what you think "quality patents" mean, or ought to mean, in contemporary industry and commerce, do please post your comments below or email this Kat here with the subject line "Quality Patents".

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Fordham on the IPKat: all the Fordham conference sessions are recorded, transcripted and published, which is good news. However, if you can't wait, this Kat hopes to do some live blogging from the event, as he has done in the past, and he also hopes to make his quality patents paper available if and when his thoughts crystallise into words.