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By J.D. Houvener
Patent Attorney and Founder

Hi, I’m J.D. Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show. Review the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner; get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. Welcome, I’m so glad you made it. This is the launch of our email campaign, and I’m hoping that this found you in your email inbox. If so, congrats! It’s awesome you’re part of the very first crew. This is hundreds of people getting this email now; soon will be thousands, right? The idea here is to make sure that you get your daily thought, get your daily motivation, that one step closer to your invention hitting the market. So, we’re here to help you daily, show up, and think about what you can do to challenge yourself to make yourself even better every day and pick up a new tidbit about patent law along the way.

So, this week I’m talking about the USPTO, and that’s the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and we’re talking a lot about policy, right? Where is it going and what are some of the projects that got in work? So, again, it’s part of a five-part series this week; we’re talking all about this to make sure we hit all the different major parts about what’s moving on with the USPTO. This week, we’re going to talk about the new USPTO director. As we talked about in previous sessions, the interim director is now no longer, and the new director is Andre Young. COO Andre Janka comes from the private sector as a patent attorney. He actually has worked both as a patent prosecutor, which is a fancy word for helping inventors get their patents, and that’s a lot of what we do here at Bold Patents. Andre also worked on the litigation side, so he’s got experience about litigating in court and arbitration and before the patent trial appeal board with his firm. So, he’s got a really firm understanding of industry knowledge; he’s not just an academic.

A lot of other folks in the community are very excited about the positive movements that he is hopefully gonna have an influence on at the USPTO. On April 12th, just a couple of weeks ago, he spoke to a large audience about what the vision is for the USPTO, and it was so exciting to hear that top of his list is patent eligibility. We talked about this last week with our patent software patent eligibility issues and lows and some of the recent wins for patent holders. But this has been a long time coming where it’s been court case after court case, and this is great news that he actually has the power to potentially lobby Congress to lay out a new set of statutory provisions that will help make everyone’s job easier—the examiners, inventors, and attorneys—to really once and for all understand what it means to be patent eligible, especially when it comes to computer-implemented inventions. So, that’s welcome news; so glad that he was able to share that with us.

The policy first on the agenda is getting patent eligibility done. The second thing he talked about was making sure that the examiners knew through their administration what was coming down the pike. It’s not just what’s the law, what’s the changes, but making sure that all of their examiners—and there’s a lot of them—are each educated on this process so that it’s predictable to inventors. And with their advocates, patent attorneys can help be more predictive and can understand better their investments they’re making into these technologies to make sure they’re gonna be able to get what they have been promised by the Patent Office.

If you picked up any good tidbits today, I encourage you to please forward this email to anyone you might know that can pick up an extra tidbit about the USPTO policies coming down and get a little insight as to what’s coming on. This week, I’m your host J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show. It’s been my pleasure being with you here this morning. Have a great day; go big, go bold.

About the Author
J.D. Houvener is a Registered USPTO Patent Attorney who has a strong interest in helping entrepreneurs and businesses thrive. J.D. leverages his technical background in engineering and experience in the aerospace industry to provide businesses with a unique perspective on their patent needs. He works with clients who are serious about investing in their intellectual assets and provides counsel on how to capitalize their patents in the market. If you have any questions regarding this article or patents in general, consider contacting J.D. Houvener at https://boldip.com/contact/