Has the Supreme Court Made Patent Reform Legislation Unnecessary?

An anonymous reader writes: As Congress gears up again to seriously consider patent litigation abuse—starting with the introduction of H.R. 9 (the "Innovation Act") last month—opponents of reform are arguing that recent Supreme Court cases have addressed concerns. Give the decisions time to work their way through the system, they assert. A recent hearing on the subject before a U.S. House Judiciary Committee (HJC) Subcommittee shined some light on the matter. And, as HJC Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a long-time leader in Internet and intellectual property issues, put it succinctly in his opening remarks: "We've heard this before, and though I believe that the Court has taken several positive steps in the right direction, their decisions can't take the place of a clear, updated and modernized statute. In fact, many of the provisions in the Innovation Act do not necessarily lend themselves to being solved by case law, but by actual law—Congressional legislation."

Comments

I am Faraday

[invictusvoyd]

you owe me 10000000 tiriion dollars for the electric motor .. assholes

Necissary, not sufficient.

[pavon]

Granted, the biggest problem with the patent system has been that the criteria for patentability has been so loose, and the recent Supreme Court rulings will certainly do more to fix that root cause than the recent patent reform bills. Hopefully going forward these new rulings will improve the quality of patents approved and upheld in court, which is by far the single most important reform needed in the long run.

But in the meanwhile there are more than 20 years of bad patents that have been granted, and the costs of defending against a patent lawsuit is still far greater than the cost of settling. We need to make it less expensive to challenge existing patents if we don't want them to continue to be a burden for the next 20+ years. That is exactly what the reform bills were about. They were designed to be complementary to the Supreme Court rulings, addressing a different parts of the problem.

Re:Necissary, not sufficient.

[BarbaraHudson]

Sounds good in theory, but the deep pockets can still push an inventor into bankruptcy by challenging a patent. This doesn't protect the little guy at all.

Re:Necissary, not sufficient.

[Theaetetus]

You're not even a little bit fearful that "patent reform" isn't doublespeak for bringing patents more inline with copyrights or some such nonsense?

I'm not. Patent term has only ever been extended once, to comply with an international treaty (the Paris Convention on Intellectual Property), and even then, it was a negligible change (20 years from filing, given an average 3 year delay from filing to issuance vs. 17 years from issuance). Compare that to copyright getting extended every time someone blinks.

There's a simple reason for this. The people pushing for longer copyright terms are the publishers who want to commercially exploit their property for as long as possible, and they've got tons of money; the people pushing for shorter copyright terms are... the public. And we have no lobbying money. So, it's an easy guess as to which one wins.

But patent is different - Apple wants their patents to last a long time, but they want Microsoft's to last a short term, and vice versa. Unlike copyright, where you don't really get Sony Pictures wanting to make a Paramount screenplay without paying royalties, you actually do have tons of large companies wanting to use each other's patents. No one wants longer terms, because all of their competitors have patents they want to use. So, there's no pile of lobbying money pushing on just one side of that equation, and patent terms don't get extended.

Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney. But the above should make sense regardless of your opinion of my work.

Here is the text

[phantomfive]

Here is the text of the law in question. Parts that interest me (ianalbirp):

1) Formalization of 'Covenant Not to Sue.'
2) Makes it harder to sue the customer when the manufacturer commits a patent violation.
3) Commissions various interesting studies on the effectiveness (or on the negative effects) of patents.

There might be more but I only have so much tolerance for reading legalese......

Re:Legislation?

[davester666]

"Making America Strong Through Eradicating Ridiculous, Baseless and Accusing Trolling Entities"

Re:Legislation?

[theshowmecanuck]

Given that the anti-reform assholes are yelling that patent reform is no longer necessary (because of the court decisions) it should be very apparent that reform is more necessary than ever. i.e. They wouldn't be saying it isn't needed if it won't make a difference.