Patents, Reform and the Little Guy

The America Invents Act offers a step toward a more effective and transparent patent protection system. This should encourage investment in inventions and faster diffusion of ideas. The bill, which has broad bipartisan support, would boost the patent office’s resources by letting it keep all the fees it collects. This would enable it to speed up the review of patent applications — which currently takes almost three years to process — and work through an immense backlog of 715,000 applications.

The bill should reduce costly litigation by creating an in-house system to look into claims of patent infringement before they go to court.

The bill would also replace the first-to-invent standard prevailing in the United States — which grants formal protection to the creator of an innovation — with the first-inventor-to-file system used in most nations.

This change would make it cheaper for American patent holders to get patent protection around the world. But it has been met with vocal opposition from some groups of small businesses and inventors who claim the change would benefit big corporations at their expense.

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Full article at nytimes.com

 

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