Prosecution Laches Is Illegitimate-And SAWS Proves It

"One of the ways judges typically evaluate whether a ruling makes sense is to game out the logical consequences of the ruling to see whether it will lead to absurd results. There is little doubt that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's prosecution laches doctrine isn't just doctrinally off-base-it leads to absurd results, which makes the doctrine structurally unworkable."

"The Federal Circuit's presumption that any patent taking more than six years to prosecute is presumptively unenforceable places the burden on patent owners to demonstrate as a threshold matter that the length of prosecution was reasonable. But the brutal, inconvenient truth is that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) itself has twice operated secret programs that froze applications for years while telling the outside world nothing-including the applicants who found themselves assigned to this pit of despair from which no applications would emerge as granted patents."

The Federal Circuit presumes patents that take more than six years to prosecute are presumptively unenforceable, shifting a threshold burden onto patent owners to prove reasonableness. The USPTO twice ran secret programs that froze applications for years without notifying applicants, blocking allowances and manipulating prosecution timelines. The Secret Application Warning System (SAWS) reportedly funneled many applications into prolonged limbo. The DOJ Weaponization of Government Working Group sent a letter seeking investigation into SAWS. The total number of affected applications is unknown due to lack of accounting. The prosecution laches doctrine produces absurd, unfair results under these facts.

Read at IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Intellectual Property Law