Patent Law Practice Center

An interview with Microsoft’s Chief Patent Counsel

Micky Minhas (pictured left) is Chief Patent Counsel for Microsoft Corporation. He is also someone that I have known for more than 20 years. Like me, Minhas is a graduate of Franklin Pierce Law Center (now part of the University of New Hampshire). What follows are excerpts from my interview with Minhas, which took place on February 20, 2015. You can read the entire interview here.

Minhas on the current state of the law and why Microsoft has adopted the European technical standard as a safe harbor approach to drafting software patent applications:

MINHAS: I think we’re in a period of uncertainty where many participants in the field are wondering where that line on subject-matter eligibility is. I view this debate as a pendulum that had State Street on one end and now it is swinging or has already swung back to the other side with Alice. That depends on how you interpret and if you see any cohesion among all the cases that we’ve seen. So I think the patent practitioner community is in a somewhat uncertain place with respect to U.S. law. In terms of our patent cases – they have been written to satisfy various standards of patentability. A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application, for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.

(more…)