Patent Reform Blog Entries

The first Senate hearing I attended struck me as a “dog and pony show” since the witnesses were presented for display purposes, merely echoing the pre-determined opinions of the presiding Senators. I’m beginning to see the animals in a less benign light.

Today, Senator Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, held a hearing on “International Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and American Competitiveness,” with Ranking Member, Senator Grassley (R-IA), in the wings and with Senators Kyl (R-AZ) and Roberts (R-KS) making cameo appearances towards the end. As for the witnesses, the deck was stacked, as appears to be more the norm than the exception.

It must be spring, and a delightful spring at that. Like swallows to Capistrano, numerous pigeons created by the IP mafia over the years are at last coming home to roost. Today’s NYT provides the most recent returning pigeon dropping its unintended consequence out of a clear blue sky.

In re Bilski is a case before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that could, if decided properly, prevent patents on business methods and other abstract ideas. The case came out of Bilski’s challenge to the Patent Office’s rejection of a patent application on a method of managing investment risks due to weather changes.

Public Knowledge, along with Consumers Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief with the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic, arguing that non-technological inventions, like abstract business methods, should not be patented. The brief also sets out a five-part test to help courts determine whether or not an invention is technological, as opposed to an abstract idea only marginally connected to technology.

Congress came back to town this week from its winter holiday break, and even though the economy, the war, the environment and the election will take center stage over the next year, Public Knowledge will have its hands full with a variety of technology, communications, copyright and patent matters. Here is a rundown of the specific issues that are likely to be addressed in 2008, in Congress and at the agencies with which PK works:

We’ve decided to get aggressive about social platforms here at PK. For a while, we’ve had a facebook group, and now we’ve started a Ning Public Knowledge group. Each offers something a little different. At facebook, you’ve got the large communities of people who are already invested in the platform. I’m hoping that they allow for group administrators to embed applications into group pages (until they do, we’ll keep manually inputting our content). That’s actually what I think the Ning group offers more of, is the ability to syndicate content.

The Patent Reform Act of 2007 has been awaiting a vote on the floor of the Senate for sometime now. Public interest groups have been hoping there will be a vote sometime this fall. The House passed a similar version of the bill on September 7th of this year. There has been too much discussion and deliberation about patent reform for this bill not to come to the Senate floor. The FTC came out with its recommendations for patent reform in 2003 and the National Academies came out with their report in 2004. Many provisions of this Patent Reform bill and its previous iteration are based on recommendations in these reports.

When the bill is considered for a vote, public interest groups only hope that some of its reform provisions don’t get watered down in effectiveness. As it stands a few key provisions in the Senate bill are more pro-reform than the House bill.

First Blackberry…now NTP is setting its sights on wireless email providers and targeting mobile devices such as PDAs, cell phones and smart phones that are capable of sending emails. What next… the laptop? NTP filed lawsuits against Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile claiming infringement of eight (8) of its patents. The lawsuits, filed in Federal District Court in Virginia, seek an injunction against the sale of these devices. Lawsuits like these threaten to deprive people of continued use of legitimately purchased products and services.

This past spring and summer was all about broadband policy for Public Knowledge - we were consumed with the 700 MHz spectrum auction, Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission proceedings regarding net neutrality, and Congressional efforts to change the way the government defines broadband and gathers data about broadband deployment and adoption.

This fall promises to be much different.

It wasn’t all tears for PK on Friday. That same day, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007. This is a bill that PK has supported because it addresses a number of the major problems with our current patent system, including the poor quality of many patents; the lack of opportunity for third parties to submit evidence that proposed patents lack originality; and damage awards that are way out of proportion to value of the infringed patent. At the end of August, we sent a letter on behalf of ourselves, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, EFF, Knowledge Ecology International and U.S. PIRG supporting the bill.

Similar versions of the Patent Reform Bill of 2007, introduced in April this year, reported out of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees recently. I gave a brief summary of bill introduced in April in my last post. The current bills, although amended, retain the essence of the provisions of the earlier bill.

Both the Senate and House versions of the bill contain provisions, which if enacted, would go a long way towards enhancing the quality of issued patents, reducing litigation and unnecessary licensing and removing artificial constraints on competition and innovation. I will mention a few provisions that stand out.