Saturday, August 20, 2005

NLJ on patent reform (H.R. 2795)

The NLJ article quotes Herbert C. Wamsley, executive director of Intellectual Property Owners Association:

"The reforms will help bring legal certainty to patent law, and some of them will address the quality of patents and reduce litigation costs," and that bringing U.S. patent law more in line with the rest of the world could also begin to lay the groundwork for "an international agreement to harmonize patent systems."

The NLJ article raised the issue of patent quality:

-->Catriona M. Collins: "The basic problem is the quality of patents," and to consider reforming the system without first giving patent examiners the resources to do their jobs properly is really just "rearranging the deck chairs." [Note also the similar point made by me in "Patent Reform 2005: Sound and Fury Signifying What?, New Jersey Law Journal, July 18, 2005.]

-->William A. Rodger, agrees that "the issue of basic patent quality remains the elephant in the room."

Wamsley acknowledged that from 1992 to 2004, about three-quarters of a billion dollars in PTO fees "were diverted to other government agencies for unrelated purposes," resulting in staffing losses that translated into a considerable work backlog.

The NLJ article talks about injunctions:

-->Rodger and others also have expressed concern that the bill pits pharmaceuticals and biotechnology against the "completely different world" of information and software technology.

For instance, pharma/biotech industries "need the power of the injunction to stop the infringement of their patents, but the proposed infringement standard does not work for software," Rodger said.

That's because in contrast to an anti-cancer drug that might be "one big drug based on one big idea," a computer software program, comprising millions of lines of code, could be "hundreds of bright ideas [that] equal maybe no patents at all, [that] equal maybe one patent, or hundreds of bright ideas [that] equal hundreds of patents," he said.

On the speed of the bill:

William P. Berridge: "In general, it's being rushed through too fast for such a major reform. It needs a lot more time for study."

Wamsley: "The House and Senate judiciary committees are really interested in patent reform and finding solutions to the quality of the patent system and the amount of litigation. The bill should be marked up in the House subcommittee [on courts, the Internet, and intellectual property] after Labor Day."

Lamar S. Smith, R-Texas: the subcommittee "has worked with a number of interest groups to put a bill together that addresses concerns with patent quality and the patent system." Smith said further: "I look forward to a hearing in September on some recent suggested changes to the bill."

The NLJ article is by Peter Geier.

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