Senate patent reform bill
Late yesterday, Senators Hatch and Leahy together introduced a patent reform bill in the Senate. It’s S. 3818, and the text is here. Senator Hatch’s statement accompanying the bill is here, and Senator Leahy’s is here.
A few interesting points to note:
- It’s bipartisan. This gives the bill a much bigger chance at passage next year, in the new session. (There’s no chance of passage this year, because there’s so little time left on the Senate’s work calendar.)
- Like the House bill, it moves us to first-to-file, and it includes a new post-grant review process. Unlike the House bill, it includes cool stuff like (a) a general fee shifting rule (i.e., loser pays), and (b) increased authority for the PTO to issue substantive rules to implement the Patent Act.
And so the careful work of comparing S. 3818 to the current version of H.R. 2795 begins …
What does “first to file” do to the convention of the prior art defense? There’s been some dispute here and [[there http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/06/0236201 ]] regarding the effect of this bill on free and open source software.
If the prior art defense disappears just because FOS programmers don’t or can’t afford to be “first to file” for patents instead of being first to invent (and publish), we’ve got a big problem.
Comment by Nato Welch — August 6, 2006 @ 11:41 am
Nato,
This is an important question. A good answer is complex, and I’m in the middle of writing it. Please check back to see it tackled in a new post.
Thanks,
Joe
Comment by Joe — August 7, 2006 @ 4:14 pm
[...] I first blogged about the Senate version of the patent reform bill back in August, just after it was introduced. [...]
Pingback by The Fire of Genius » A “loser pays” attorney fee rule — December 8, 2006 @ 4:46 pm