Bob Taylor

Bob Taylor is the founder and owner of RPT Legal Strategies PC in San Francisco and Palo Alto, providing legal and business advice to companies and investors with respect to all aspects of intellectual property, competition law and related fields of endeavor.

For more than 40 years, Bob has focused primarily on intellectual property litigation, serving as lead trial counsel and/or appellate counsel in dozens of patent, copyright, trade secret and antitrust cases involving a wide range of technologies and industries.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a Lifetime Member of the American Law Institute.

Bob has written and lectured extensively on the business and legal problems associated with both intellectual property protection and the laws related to competition.  He served for several years as the co-chair of the Antitrust Committee of Intellectual Property Owners Association and also as a Member of IPO’s Amicus Committee.  Bob served as a member of the 1992 Commission on Patent Law Reform.  He is a former chair of the Antitrust Section of American Bar Association and a long-time member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  He is one of the founding board members for the U.S. Intellectual Property Alliance and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Alliance of U.S. Startups and Inventors for Jobs.

Explainer: Standard Essential Patents and National Security

By Christopher Borges Technology standards are a critical domain of international cooperation and competition in high technology. Standards create a common language for communication about technology and innovation, allowing firms to collaborate and develop interoperable products. At the same time, for some critical and emerging technologies such as telecommunications and artificial
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Assessing the Patent and Trademark Office’s Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions

By Alexander Kersten As new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) become more sophisticated, AI tools are increasingly used to assist in the process of invention. However, given that inventorship is limited to natural persons under U.S. law, AI’s growing utilization has raised questions around whether AI-assisted inventions should receive patents,
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Securing IP and the Future of Pandemic Preparedness

By Jeffrey Depp In December 2021, member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) at a Special Session of the World Health Assembly created an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement, or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (“Pandemic Agreement”). The
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