The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) today that would allow practitioners who are not registered with the USPTO patent bar to act as lead counsel in proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The Office has decided to propose that practitioners must still be represented by a registered practitioner, but to allow parties to “designate a non-registered practitioner as lead counsel and the registered practitioner as back-up counsel.”

A bipartisan group of 28 members of congress, including Senate IP Subcommittee Chair Chris Coons (D-DE), Ranking Member Thom Tillis (R-NC) and House IP Subcommittee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA), sent a letter yesterday to President Biden urging the administration to reconsider its December proposal to allow agencies to consider pricing in deciding whether and when to “march in” on patent rights. Also yesterday, four bipartisan senators wrote to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in opposition to the negotiating text of the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Agreement, warning that it “would undercut—if not destroy—the very aspects of our innovation ecosystem that just recently produced such positive results.”

In an opposition brief filed Monday, The New York Times Company (The Times) told a New York district court that OpenAI’s late February claim that The Times “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” in order to prove OpenAI infringed its copyrights amounts to little more than “grandstanding.” In late December 2023, the Times became the latest of many complainants to accuse OpenAI’s Large Language Model, ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing Chat, of widespread copyright infringement. The Times alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI reproduce Times content verbatim and also often attribute false information to the Times. The Times’ opposition brief filed yesterday responds to OpenAI’s recent motion to dismiss, which alleged that The Times paid someone to target and exploit “a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”