DCAWD.com

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved landmark legislation to overhaul the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a reform effort more than half a decade in the making that aims to improve the quality of patents and curb frivolous litigation.

The America Invents Act, originally titled the Patent Reform Act, cleared the upper chamber by a vote of 95 to five, a resounding legislative victory for the bill's author, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has backed efforts to reform the patent system in each of the previous three Congresses.

"Reforming the nation's antiquated patent system will promote American innovation, create American jobs. It will grow our economy," Leahy said today on the Senate floor.

Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) were original co-sponsors of the bill.

The debate over patent reform has been closely watched by members of the tech sector, which have long pressed for measures to shield themselves from patent litigation that they argue is often a burdensome distraction. At the same time, several groups representing inventors and small businesses have long campaigned against any provision that would weaken the legal mechanisms available to their members to assert their patents.

Excluded from the bill was a controversial amendment, backed by many tech companies, that would have eased the process for initiating an in-house administrative review process at the Patent Office for challenges to patents that have been granted, a measure billed as a less costly alternative to private litigation.

The Senate bill would transition the Patent Office to a so-called first-to-file system, bringing the U.S. system in line with the patent regimes of much of the rest of the world. The shift would confer patent rights on the first inventor or company to file an application, rather than the current first-to-invent system

Other, less controversial provisions of the bill include language to end fee diversion, a measure that would ensure that the filing fees patent applicants pay fund the Patent Office. Over the years, patent fees have been diverted to fund other government programs, a condition that has left the office strapped for resources and seen its backlog swell to more than 700,000 applications.

scheherazade wrote:Not too happy about first to file.
Proving they invented it isn't necessary anymore??? hmm...
How could this go very well for people with lots of lawyers, and very bad for small timers?

Companies with lawyers on hand will be micro-filing constantly.
Hell, they can just look at something you did, file a patent for it, and you're F'd.
I bet there will be companies that exist on scouring for existing non-patented ideas, and patenting them.
I bet there will be a massive IP land grab after this.

-scheherazade

zaxrex wrote:considering the entire industry that has spawned to make sense of the mess, I'm not sure everybody will be happy.

We've mentioned a couple of times that now that ACTA is "complete", if not yet approved, USTR negotiators have moved on to what many are calling the son of ACTA in the form of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The USTR has shown what it's learned from the ACTA negotiations: which is that it can absolutely get away with unprecedented levels of secrecy. It has no problem sharing details with industry representatives, but the public and consumers who will be most impacted by the intellectual property rules found in TPP are kept completely away. However, as with ACTA, there are leaks. KEI has been able to get a leaked version of the current proposal from the USTR, and as we'd been hearing, it really is another industry wish-list of stricter anti-consumer intellectual property rules, that go well beyond current US law. This is the entertainment industry and the pharma industry trying to bypass the actual law-making process and using "friends" within the USTR to get such rules in place via secretive, non-democratic, treaty making processes. It's really a sickening display of crony capitalism and regulatory capture at work. Anyone working in the USTR should be ashamed of this document.

The House on Wednesday took up the most far-reaching overhaul of the patent system in 60 years, a bill that leaders in both parties said would make it easier for inventors to get their innovations to market and help put people back to work.

The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world.

The Senate passed a similar bill last March on a 95-5 vote. If the bill makes it to the White House for the president's signature, it could be one of the first congressional actions this year to have a concrete effect on business after months of the GOP-led House voting on bills that head straight for the political graveyard of the Democratic-controlled and slow-moving Senate.

A final vote is expected later in the week.