House Panel Approves Patent Reform
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Legislation designed to overhaul the U.S. patent system was approved by the House Committee on the Judiciary.
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A U.S. House of Representatives committee voted on Thursday to give the Food and Drug Administration more power to monitor the side effects of medicines after they reach the market.
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The House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a $146 billion election-year economic stimulus plan backed by President George W. Bush.
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(InfoWorld) - TheÂ U.S. congressman who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee says Congress could pass an immigration reform bill by July, including lifting the limit on how many high-tech engineers can come to the U.S. for jobs. Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat from California, made the prediction while speaking at the first ever Tech Industry Summit in San Jose, California. "It could pass both houses by July, go to conference, and be on the president's desk by September," Berman said. Immigration reform deals largely with the 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the U.S., but another provision of the bill affects technology companies in particular. Tech companies want the limit on H1-B visas raised to 115,000 per year, from 65,000, a limit that has already been reached for 2007. H1-B is the type of visa granted to skilled foreign workers in "specialty occupations," including IT, so that they can work in the U.S. "There is significant urgency on this issue," said Pamela Passman, vice president of global corporate affairs for Microsoft, also speaking at the summit. About half the students enrolled in engineering schools in the U.S. are foreign nationals who have to return to their home countries after earning their degrees, depriving U.S. companies of the chance to hire them,Â  Passman said. Republican President George W. Bush proposed a guest worker program for illegal immigrants, but opposition from within his own party kept the legislation from passing in 2006. Now, with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and Democrats generally endorsing the guest worker program, passage is more likely, Berman said. Berman is chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, which will be considering patent reform legislation. Tech companies have long complained about people who buy up patents just to collect license fees, but many small inventors own patents and don't have the means to bring the patented products to market, so they license the patents to others. Reform is also expected to focus on the quality of patents granted. Tech groups have pushed for better funding for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a post-patent review process as a way to challenge patents that may not be deserved. "I think determining validity and infringement could be settled more quickly in a nonfederal court system environment," said Berman. The Tech Policy Summit is expected to draw 300 people to Silicon Valley, including technology industry figures, organizers of technology lobbying groups in Washington, D.C., and lawmakers. Technology companies had not been active in lobbying the federal government 20 years ago but have been forced to get involved as Internet-related issues like privacy protection, cybersecurity, and intellectual property disputes have emerged, said Gary Fazzino, vice president of governmental affairs at Hewlett-Packard.
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WASHINGTON, DC- By a voice vote, the House of Representatives last night approved a resolution introduced by Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chairman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) congratulating Mojave Aerospace Ventures for winning the X Prize and
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(InfoWorld) - In the wake of a recent landmark Supreme Court ruling, patent reform is bubbling toward a boil on Capitol Hill, where advocates in both parties and both chambers are urging timely action on pending legislation and contending with well-financed interest groups on both sides of the issue. "This is a big fight about winners and losers," said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., adding that he is not entirely satisfied with the pending Patent Reform Act of 2007, which was introduced in the Senate in April. "The question is how do we strike the balance." The Patent Reform Act legislation would make the requirements for obtaining a new patent more stringent, make it easier for rivals to challenge patents, and reduce the penalties for patent violations. Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont said that he, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and a number of other colleagues have been working on the nonpartisan bill for several years and that the existing patent system was designed for a bygone era. A decision by the Supreme Court in April in the case of KSR International vs. Teleflex marked a major clarification of the court's thinking about the granting of patents for new inventions and set a higher bar for what qualifies as an original invention. The ruling has already prompted legal wrangling between VoIP vendor Vonage in its ongoing dispute with Verizon over Internet telephony patents, and legal experts say that the ruling was a direct rebuke to lower courts that have tended to favor patent owners over those challenging the legality of patents that have been issued. Despite strong support from Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers for change in the patent system, however, passage of the bill into law is not assured.Â  IT behemoths, including Cisco, Apple, Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Oracle, have aligned as the Coalition for Patent Fairness to press for the sweeping changes envisioned in the bill. They maintain that reforms are necessary to reduce costly, sometimes frivolous litigation. However, other technology companies, including InterDigital Communications and Qualcomm, have banded together as the Innovation Alliance and joined the biotechnology and manufacturing sectors to limit changes to the system. They argue that the bill would give patent infringers an advantage. The high stakes involved in the patent issue were illustrated June 6 at a hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which was briefly delayed as committee aides tried to locate an extra room for the overflowing crowd. "What we're trying to do here is move the process forward," Sen. Orrin Hatch said in an appeal to lobbyists for compromise once the hearing got started. "There are a number of organizations who could stop this bill." The bill's two main sticking points are a provision that would give the public a new opportunity to review patents after they've been granted, and a provision granting the right for an immediate appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after a district court has made a pre-trial ruling on the framework that will be used to determine infringement (known as a "claim construction"). Large IT companies and the financial industry support the "post-grant review" of patents, which would allow for a reevaluation of suspect patent claims before companies are forced to go through lengthy, costly litigation, John Squires, chief intellectual property counsel at Goldman, Sachs & Co., told the committee. Opponents countered that the proposed post-grant review process would create an essentially limitless opportunity for rivals to challenge patents. "If a patent can be easily challenged at any time under a low standard of proof, (then) patents will have much less value, and investment predicated upon them will inevitably be diminished," Kathryn Biberstein, senior vice president of Alkermes, a biotechnology company, told the committee in her testimony. "This, in turn, will likely result in fewer cures for diseases and other breakthrough biotechnology products." The biotech industry and the Innovation Alliance also oppose the right for an immediate appeal after a claim construction ruling, arguing that it would encourage appeals, further prolonging cases. But advocates, including Palm senior vice president Mary Doyle, said it would reduce the chance of conducting unnecessary trials and cut down litigation costs. The witnesses were eager to raise two other controversial provisions in the legislation, regarding how damages in patent cases are determined and the expansion of the Patent and Trademark Office's authority to make rules. Doyle and Squires, supporting the bill's "mandatory apportionment" of damages provision, told the committee that damages today can be unreasonably high because the calculation is based on the value of an entire product, not just the patented feature at issue. Countering that argument, Biberstein and Bruce Bernstein, chief intellectual property and licensing officer at InterDigital, said that the provision would replace today's market-oriented valuation of inventions with subjective jury findings. Debate on expanding the PTO's rulemaking authority mirrored the rest of the patent debate with representatives from the financial sector and the Coalition for Patent Reform joining forces in support, while witnesses from the biotechnology sector and the Innovation Alliance cautioned against the change. An identical House version of the Patent Reform Act is pending, having recently won approval by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Leahy said he is eager to prepare the legislation for a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but he did not indicate when that vote might occur.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Lawmakers returning from their summer break are expected to consider patent law changes that have pitted two of America's most invention-dependent industries against each other.
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Patent reform legislation before the U.S. Congress would kill the value of patents and allow companies from other countries to steal U.S. intellectual property, a group of inventors said Thursday.
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The House of Representatives voted to revise rules for foreign investments in the U.S., seeking to make them clearer for businesses while preserving national security.
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Sweeping changes to U.S. patent system have been approved by Senate and House committees. The high-tech industry is pleased, but others aren't.
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WASHINGTON - Technology and financial services firms won a key patent reform victory yesterday when the House approved legislation, 220 to 175, that the industries have pushed for years.
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Legislation meant to improve the government's drug safety oversight cleared a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday without a controversial limit on television advertisements.
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A House subcommittee approved legislation yesterday that would give US regulators new power to oversee drug safety by ordering changes on pharmaceutical labels and forcing drug makers to conduct studies of products after they're on the market.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. House of Representatives hasÂ passed a bill to overhaul the nation's patent system, overcoming objections by many Republicans, small inventors and some labor unions. Passed on Friday, the Patent Reform Act,Â supported by several large tech vendors including Microsoft and IBM, would allow courts to change they way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent; the bill would allow, but not require, courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece. The bill would also allow a new way to challenge patents within one year after they've been granted. The HouseÂ passedÂ the ActÂ by a vote of 225-175. The Senate has not yet acted on a similar piece of legislation. However, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a statement on Thursday saying it opposes the bill. It said that the changes in assessment of damages would "introduce new complications and risks reducing incentives to innovate." The OMB objections raise the possibility that President George Bush could veto the legislation. Large tech vendors have been pushing for patent reform for close to five years. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the Business Software Alliance, and the Computing Technology Industry Association, all praised the House for passing the bill. House passage is a "significant step toward improving our patent system," said Mark Bohannon, SIIA's senior vice president of public policy. Asked about the OMB's opposition to the bill, Bohannon said recent changes have addressed many concerns. Apportionment of damages, one of the OMB's major concerns, needs to change, he added. "If we don't address the problem, we're not going to improve the system," he said. Many Democrats and some Republicans argued the bill is needed because patent infringement lawsuits have gotten out of hand. It's too easy for patent holders to sue and collect huge damage awards when a small piece of a tech product is found to infringe, supporters argued. The patent system "is getting near broken," said Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat and primary sponsor of the bill. "Doing nothing is not a good answer for a Congress that wants the economy strong." Opponents argued the bill favors tech giants at the expense of small inventors. "The legislation ... helps a small group of powerful people," said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican. Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat, noted that between 1993 and 2005, four major tech vendors supporting the bill paid out US$3.5 billion in patent infringement settlements. But those same unnamed tech vendors had revenues of $1.4 trillion during that time period, she said. Tech vendors want to reduce patent infringement costs "not by changing their obviously unfair and often illegal business practices, but by persuading Congress and the Supreme Court to weaken U.S. patent protections," she said. "We ought to stand up for American inventors." The bill also sets into motion a change in the way patents are awarded, from the first-to-invent system unique to the U.S. to the first-to-file system used by the rest of the world.
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(InfoWorld) - The House Committee on the Judiciary approved far-reaching legislation to reform the nation's patent system Wednesday. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 largely reflects the IT sector's lobbying effort to curtail lengthy, expensive patent infringement lawsuits, but Wednesday's committee deliberations centered on finding compromises acceptable to opponents â namely the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, manufacturers, and large research universities â so that the bill could win approval. Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., described the current patent system as inefficient, bogged down by inappropriate litigation rules, unreliably funded, and resulting in patents of "questionable quality."Â  The bill would make it harder to secure a patent and easier for rivals to challenge one, and it would change how courts determine an infringed patent's value.Â  However, the version approved by the committee does not go as far on any of those fronts as the IT industry would have liked, and continued negotiations are underway. "Needless to say, our journey has been rugged," Conyers said, urging members to pass the bill out of committee. "We meet here today with the realization that we haven't finished the discussions. The meetings have gone on almost endlessly in some people's minds because compromises are necessary." The proposal Conyers brought forward addresses two of the most controversial provisions under discussion:Â  How courts determine the damages paid to patent holders by infringers and whether challengers are allowed to review patents after they've been granted. Assessing damages Calling the damages provision the most complex issue, the bill's original sponsor, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said that allowing judges to determine damages by assessing the value of a component within an invention that was infringed â rather than the value of the entire product â would correct "bizarre and wrong-headed trends" in patent litigation.Â  Originally, the bill mandated that courts calculate damages by such an "apportionment" formula, which the IT industry largely supported.Â  However, the committee agreed to give judges the discretion to decide whether damages should be determined by apportionment, by the market value of the entire invention, or by other means.Â  Several committee members, including Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., said they would like to see further refinement of the provision because Congress canât predict the consequences of the apportionment analysis. "It would be important to give the court flexibility," Feeney said, adding that the bill could unduly diminish the value of some patents.Â  "We are in a whole new world of uncertainty." Promoting higher quality patents In a move that would make it easier to challenge a patent without going through costly litigation â and simultaneously make it harder for inventors to secure patents â the bill allows the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to review patents after they've been granted. In response to concerns raised by research universities and others, however, it limits the timeframe for such review. The legislation also makes it harder to secure a patent by giving third parties more opportunity to submit information to the PTO during the application process to ensure that only innovative inventions are patented.Â  The bill moves the patent system from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" system, but in another nod to large universities, the committee clarified a grace period on filing patent applications for inventors who disclose or publish inventions in advance of seeking a patent. Discouraging excessive litigation In an attempt to reduce abuses in patent litigation and discourage frivolous cases from being filed and non-frivolous cases from being unnecessarily drawn out, two other provisions were heavily debated and amended before the bill was approved: The ability of alleged infringers to charge patent holders with "inequitable conduct," and the patent holder's flexibility in selecting a venue for a case. Currently, alleged infringers can argue that a patent is invalid on the grounds that the holder did not sufficiently disclose information about an invention and thereby engaged in inequitable conduct. The often-used tactic is widely seen as a way to divert attention from the merits of the patent itself.Â  The bill narrows the circumstances under which this defense could be used and gives courts a range of options to remedy such conduct when it is found.Â  In an effort to curb forum shopping, the bill restricts patent holders to four options when choosing a venue to file a suit in.Â  However, the bill provides leeway for individual inventors, universities, and "micro entities" to bring patent cases where they reside. Noting that members of Congress cannot predict the consequences of the sweeping reform legislation, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, proposed requiring the PTO to conduct periodic studies of the impact of the most controversial provisions.Â  The proposal was enthusiastically approved. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to continue deliberating its version of the patent reform legislation Thursday.
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The 247-176 roll call Thursday by which the House passed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.
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The U.S. House of Representatives  approved a bill on Wednesday aimed at strengthening Food and  Drug Administration drug safety oversight and raising  pharmaceutical industry fees that help speed product reviews.