THE DEFINITION OF ‘PRO SE’ IS FAIRLY BROAD
In a recent case before the Federal Circuit – In re Martin G. Reiffin – the Federal Circuit went to great lengths to excuse the form and substance of the appeal due to the fact that the appellant was “pro se”.
For those who don’t know, ‘pro se’ means “a person who does not hire a lawyer and appears for himself/herself in court”.
So, you would assume that there was no lawyer involved in the appeal – well, you would assume wrong.
It turns out that the appellant himself – i.e., Martin G. Reiffin – is an attorney at law (New York Bar admission is marked as delinquent), a registered patent attorney and previously worked for IBM as a patent attorney. In fact, Mr. Reiffin was quoted in a Wired magazine article in 1998 about his lawsuit he was bringing against Microsoft for patent infringement. When asked why he was suing Microsoft, he responded:
Virtually all commercial software on the market uses multithreading – which allows two or more sets of operations to be executed simultaneously in a single program – but Reiffin says he’s suing Microsoft “because they have 90 percent of the market.”
“They asked Willie Sutton: ‘Why do you rob a bank?’ And he answered, ‘Because that’s where the money is,'” said Reiffin, a former IBM patent attorney who says he retired after his hobby of tinkering with hi-fi amplifiers turned him into a multimillionaire.
Did the Federal Circuit erroneously go easy on Mr. Reiffin? Some might say yes… but considering that the Federal Circuit invalidated all of the claims in Mr. Reiffin’s patent on computer hyperthreading (U.S. Patent No. 5,694,603) – it doesn’t look like Mr. Reiffin got off all that easy.