Events
Engine Advocacy | Lunch Panel: Why Patent Quality Matters Across Industries
As we launch Patent Quality Week 2025, join Engine for lunch catered by Bullfrog Bagels and a panel discussion featuring startup founders and patent experts on Thursday, June 26 at 12 PM. RSVP to hear why patent quality matters across industries in 2237 Rayburn House Office Building.
Partner Panel | Seed Patents & Power: How Intellectual Property Law Shapes Our Food System
How do patents on seeds affect what farmers and researchers can grow--and what we all eat? Join leading experts from academia and the seed industry to explore how U.S. intellectual property laws influence seed diversity, prices, and innovation. Hosted by the Public Interest Patent Law Institute.
Engine Advocacy | San Diego In-District Panel: Startups & Patent Quality
As part of Patent Quality Week and Startup Summer 2025, join Engine for hors d'oeuvres and a panel discussion featuring startup founders and patent experts on Monday, June 30 at 4 PM PT. RSVP to hear why high-quality patents are essential to the innovation ecosystem and how low-quality patents pose challenges to startups and small businesses at Hera Hub Mission Valley.
Partner Panel | Unlocking Innovation: The Fight Against SEP Abuse
So much of our modern technology uses standards – whether it’s scrolling on your phone, using telehealth services, taking your new car for a spin, and beyond, your day-to-day life revolves around hundreds of technical standards. To support a competitive standards ecosystem, standard essential patent (SEP) holders volunteer to license their technology on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. But a minority of bad actors use favorable legal system to hold standards hostage, resulting in costly litigation that stifles innovation. Hosted by Save Our Standards.
Resources
PQW2025
A Broken PTAB Poses a Barrier to U.S. Innovation
America’s 34.6 million small businesses are the backbone of American ingenuity and job creation, yet they are the most vulnerable to abuses in today’s evolving patent landscape. Designed to encourage invention, patents can be abused when erroneously granted or improperly asserted, oftentimes at the expense of small innovators.
Still Ignoring the Obvious: The USPTO’s Outdated Approach Hurts Innovation
Seventeen years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) continues to flout the Court’s clear instruction: to apply a flexible and broad test for obviousness. Unfortunately, the USPTO still clings to the rigid formulaic test came before KSR and should have fallen by the wayside after it. Because of this, the Patent and Trial Appeal Board (PTAB) routinely requires specific evidence of a “motivation to combine” well-known features before it will recognize combinations of them obviousness.
The U.S. Automotive Industry to USPTO: Preserve Patent Quality
The U.S. automotive industry is an engine of innovation. Automotive companies own tens of thousands of patents on inventions that have transformed personal mobility for Americans across the country. Those high-quality patents protect the billions of dollars that automotive companies invest in research and development to produce new vehicle technologies and deliver cleaner, safer, and smarter personal vehicles.
Patent Policy & Startups
A patent is a limited right, of about 20 years, that the government grants to inventors in exchange for disclosing how their invention works. To earn a patent, the invention must be new new and clearly explained clearly explained so others can understand it. The inventor named on a patent can use it to either produce the invention (and keep others from copying them) or sell licenses so others can produce the invention.
Tackling High Drug Prices Requires Patent Reforms, Too
President Donald J. Trump just released his second executive order (EO) addressing high prescription drug prices. This is perhaps a welcome announcement for those who have to pay for prescription drugs on a regular basis. U.S. drug prices remain nearly three times higher than in other countries leaving many Americans struggling to afford their prescribed medications.
The PERA and PREVAIL Acts Would Make Bad Patents Easier to Get—and Harder to Fight
Two dangerous bills have been reintroduced in Congress that would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) and the PREVAIL Act would each cause significant harm on their own.
Sacrificing Patent Quality for the Sake of “Efficiency”
The Trump administration’s push for “efficiency” is undercutting key programs and tools that maintain balanced intellectual property frameworks that protect startups against low-quality patents and meritless, but expensive and time consuming, litigation.
Joint Letter Urging Repeal of the Fintiv Rule
This joint letter urges senior U.S. officials to repeal the Fintiv rule and restore fair access to inter partes review while warning that the current policy endangers American innovation by enabling the enforcement of invalid patents.
Coalition Letter to the Trump Administration on Patent Abuse
It is critical that the Trump Administration stop hostile foreign companies, and abusive patent holders more generally, from unfairly and unreasonably holding standardized technologies hostage and depriving American businesses and citizens of their benefits.
Engine’s Letter Opposing Patent Reform Legislation
In addition to the concerns we previously expressed on S.2140, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) of 20231 and S.2220, the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership (PREVAIL) Act, we write to further highlight the bills’ implications on the startup ecosystem, specifically in relation to patent quality and startups’ ability to defend their patents.
Joint Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership Act Opposition Letter
We strongly urge you to oppose the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership Act (the “PREVAIL Act”), which was recently placed on the markup agenda. This bill would further weaken protections against abusive patent litigation, create unjustified obstacles to PTAB review, substantially degrade the performance of the PTAB, and significantly reduce patent quality and the ability of the patent system to promote technological progress.
Joint Patent Eligibility Restoration Act Opposition Letter
We are writing to urge you to oppose the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, S. 2140, which the Judiciary Committee has listed for mark up. PERA would turn the U.S. patent system upside down, severing patent rights from their historic mooring to improvements in technology. PERA would lead to a wave of crippling litigation against American manufacturers, innovative technology companies, and main street businesses.