US patent reform clears House hurdle
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Could bring US patent awards in line with rest of world A proposed law revolutionising US patent legislation has passed through a vital committee of the House of Representatives. The bill has got further than previous attempts at such reform.â¦
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Rejected by voters and limping off stage, the Republican-led House on Friday passed a sweeping bill reviving expired tax breaks and preventing doctors from taking a big cut in Medicare payments.
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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.
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Technology and financial services firms won a key patent reform victory Friday when the House approved legislation the industries have pushed for years by a vote of 220-175.
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The House on Thursday passed the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades, a measure designed to end a nasty trade war with Europe and shower $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups.</
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In a victory for President George W. Bush, the House of Representatives on Wednesday defeated a Democratic bid to temporarily extend an expiring spy law instead of replacing it with a new measure that also would immunize telephone companies from lawsuits.
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The House of Representatives on Thursday approved a huge corporate tax bill aimed at ending a trade dispute with the European Union while giving American manufacturers a new tax break.
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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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A major rewrite of corporate tax law that would end a trade dispute with Europe won congressional negotiators&#39; backing yesterday after House Republicans beat back efforts to increase tobacco regulation.
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U.S. 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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Some of the rules changes approved Tuesday by the House at the opening of the 109th session of Congress:
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The effort to secure government-backed &quot;green bonds&quot; for the proposed Destiny USA project in Syracuse cleared a major hurdle in Congress Wednesday, and proponents were hoping for approval by the end of the week.
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OCTOBER 04, 2004  - Some things are patently ridiculous. One is the US patent system, an institution in desperate need of reform.
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(InfoWorld) - Legislation that would overhaul the U.S. patent system would hurt innovation and decrease the value of patents, representatives of two tech companies said Wednesday. Though the legislation is supported by many large IT vendors, two bills now being considered by the U.S. Congress, both called the Patent Reform Act, go too far in watering down the patent system, said representatives of Texas Instruments (TI) and AmberWave Systems, a New Hampshire semiconductor manufacturer. While both companies support large chunks of the bills, one in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate, provisions that would change the way courts apportion damages in patent lawsuits and allow new ways to challenge existing patents would hurt their businesses, said Christopher Gallagher, a lawyer representing AmberWave. "For more than 200 years, the [U.S. patent] system has worked well," Gallagher said during a debate sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus. The patent reform debate is often portrayed as high-tech vs. large pharmaceutical companies, but TI and AmberWave are among the tech companies asking Congress to scale back its efforts to change the patent system. Representatives of CiscoÂ and the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a trade group representing Microsoft, Dell, and IBM, called for Congress to pass the patent reform bills. Cisco spends $45 million a year defending itself against patent lawsuits, said Matt Tanielian, director of government relations for the company. The company currently is defending against a dozen patent lawsuits, "most of them by companies that have never built or sold anything," he said. Patent reform is the company's top priority in Congress this year, Tanielian said. "There's a lot of bad patents out there," he said. "When you get sued, you ought to get a fair shake." Among the most controversial issues: The bills would change the way courts apportion damages when a company is found to infringe a patent. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent, but Cisco and other supporters of the bills want Congress to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece. The current system encourages lawsuits by patent holders hoping to win a legal "lottery," said Emery Simon, a lawyer for the BSA. The awards are unfair because the small piece patent holders often add to a larger product "is less than what they're trying to claim," he said. But Amy Burke, TI's director of government relations, said the apportionment changes would take away from the value of patents. "This language would trivialize damages and actually encourage infringement," she said. Another major issue in the bills is a new way of challenging patents after they're issued, called post-grant review. The bills would allow companies sued for patent infringement to file challenges with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) The post-grant review would create a continuing question about whether a patent was valid, making it difficult for small companies like AmberWave to get funding, Gallagher said. "If we can't get venture capital, we can't function," he said. Instead of a new way to challenge patents after they're granted, Congress should focus on giving the USPTO more money, he said. "The way to ensure patent quality is to get it right the first time," he said. BSA's Simon said worries about a new post-grant review watering down the value of patents are overblown, because there are several ways to challenge patents now. But the USPTO's current patent-challenging mechanisms don't work well, and the most common way of challenging a patent, in a lawsuit, can cost millions of dollars, he said. "We think administrative challenges are good things," he said. "It saves time, it saves money."
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(InfoWorld) - A group of five Republican senators is seeking a delay in legislation, supported by several large tech vendors, that would overhaul the U.S. patent system. The five, including Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sam Brownback of Kansas, have asked for more hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee moves ahead with the Patent Reform Act, which is scheduled to be amended and approved in a Thursday hearing. The five sent a letter Monday to the Judiciary Committee asking for more hearings. "Many prominent American businesses on the cutting edge of innovation are expressing concerns about the impact of sweeping patent reform," said the letter, also signed by Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Jeff Sessions of Alabama. "These concerns merit thoughtful deliberation." Many observers have called the Patent Reform Act the most sweeping reform of U.S. patent laws in decades. The bill would make it tougher for inventors to obtain new patents, make it easier to challenge patents, and reduce the legal penalties for patent violations. Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. have praised the bill, saying it's too easy for the owners of questionable patents to sue tech companies and collect large damages or shut down entire product lines with court injunctions when one small piece of a product allegedly infringes a patent. "This important measure ensures that our patent system continues to foster innovation and economic growth by promoting improvements in patent quality [and] discouraging litigation abuse," Microsoft said in a statement when the bill was introduced. But five Republican senators raised concerns about the bill, echoed by some small tech companies and other members of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, a group calling for less sweeping changes to the U.S. patent system. The senators questioned the bill's attempt to apportion patent award damages. The bill would limit the damages a patent holder can collect when an infringing technology is part of a larger product, based on the value of the patented technology itself, instead of the value of the larger product. Courts now generally consider the value of the larger product when assessing damages. The senators also questioned the bill's provisions to allow new ways to challenge patents after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted them. These changes "need to be more carefully examined to ensure that they do not undermine innovation, increase frivolous litigation, or undermine property rights," the letter said. The letter also calls on the committee to look harder at ways to improve patent quality.
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The House, by a vote of 280 to 141, gave final approval last night to a far-reaching tax bill that provides a rich array of breaks to manufacturing companies, energy producers and small businesses and underwrites a $10 billion buyout of American tobacco
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The U.S. House of Representatives  defied President Bush on Thursday and voted to block his  administration's controversial new overtime regulations for  white-collar workers. The vote was 223-193.