I will be speaking at the Intellectual Property Owners Association annual meeting in San Antonio next Monday, September 10th. 

I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled “Clean Tech Reality Check:  Are Green Patents the Red Herring of International Climate Change Policy?”. 

The other panel members are Allison Mages, Senior Counsel for IP Procurement and Policy at GE, Doug Pearson of the Jones Day law firm, and Sara Boettiger, a Berkeley economics professor and Founder & CEO of Global Access to Technology for Development.  Bryan Vogel, a partner at the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, will moderate.

My presentation is called “Global Green Patenting:  Risks and Opportunities from the Fast Track to the Highway.”  In it I will review the anti-patent policies proposed by the UN and developing countries in international climate change treaty talks.  Such policies seek to weaken or eliminate green patents due to a belief that patents act as a barrier to international transfer of clean technologies.

My talk will highlight significant instances of clean tech transfer that belie the notion that green patents are acting as such a barrier. 

I will also provide an overview of some of the opportunities in international green patenting such as the fast track programs offered by a number of national IP offices around the world and discuss  strategies for expediting green patent applications in the USPTO now that the Green Technology Pilot Program is closed.

Doug will go into more detail about the anti-green patent policies and discuss some of the literature on the role of IP rights in commercializing green technologies.  Allison’s presentation will highlight the importance of IP rights in green innovation and deployment of green technologies.

Finally, Sara will provide important context as to why developing countries need adaptation and mitigation technologies and make the case for working together within existing IP systems to foster diffusion of these critical technologies.

Other notable speakers at the IPO annual meeting include Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Randall Rader, Neil Warma, President and CEO of Opexa Therapeutics, and Patently-O Founder and Missouri School of Law Professor Dennis Crouch.

The meeting is at the JW Marriott Hill Country September 9-11.  More information can be found in the meeting brochure here.

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