Free Republic

<p>Mr. Quinn politely understated the distressed situation to which the U.S. patent system has fallen over the past couple of decades.</p><p>Congress created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), an administrative quasijudicial panel of questionable constitutionality, in the destructive 2011 America Invents Act. Then an ex-Google PTO director set up PTAB in such a tilted manner that it extirpates 84 percent of patent claims brought before it.</p>

I recently had the pleasure to sit on a panel with a number of incredible inventors and leaders on innovation issues in an experience that was both inspiring and infuriating. Discussing a new documentary on the patent system – Invalidated: The Shredding of the US Patent System – which I had the honor of being interviewed for, we discussed the state of the patent system and American innovation. I was inspired by these inventors who joined, and others who participated in this movie. Through ingenuity, creativity and persistence they have created inventions that save lives, increase productivity, make life easier...

Of all the threats to free markets, two of the most dangerous are today having an adverse impact on the justice and viability of our patent system. The concept of "venue" plays a critical role in our judicial system in ensuring fairness and due process for litigating parties. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that a company should not be able to attain business success through relationships with government officials alone. However, those who wish to abuse our current patent system for their own advantage are exploiting local laws and loopholes to undermine small businesses and the country's economy as a...

In our judicial system, the concept of "venue" plays a critical role in ensuring fairness and due process for litigating parties. The term essentially refers to judicial rules specifying the district in which a particular lawsuit may be litigated. Ideally, cases should only be heard in districts where a defendant resides, where a substantial portion of the events giving rise to the lawsuit occurred or where a substantial portion of the witnesses or property at issue are situated. Although the subject of venue may gloss the eyes of first-year law students and the general public alike, our Founding Fathers considered...

It is disappointing to see so many people who usually reside on the Right go screaming Leftward on an issue so fundamental to all-things-free-market as private property protection. In this particular case patent protection. All sorts of things that in every other instance the Right loves to excoriate and ridicule - these Converts-to-the-Left must ignore or accept as a part of their effort to undermine the patent system. Do these Converts mean to undermine the system? I doubt it. But we do know that's what the Left wants to do (Hello, Google) and these Converts are helping them do it....

During the fourth Republican debate, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina correctly noted that "big government has created a big business called politics. And there are lots of people invested in the status quo of that big business called politics." What Fiorina did not say was that, particularly in the tech sphere, the big business of politics loves to attempt hostile takeovers, often in the guise of trying to stop genuinely predatory behavior. Ironically, the biggest beneficiaries of such takeovers are usually the predators themselves. No better example of such disingenuous action exists than the current proposed FCC enforcement action...

Fall is always a busy time on Capitol Hill. Members usually wait for this time of year to consider the most controversial and thorny issues like appropriation bills to keep the government open and tax legislation that expires at the end of the year. Deals are made and legislators look for any opening to sneak through supposed non-controversial legislation without much debate or fanfare. Add to this yearly spectacle the fact that House Republicans are in the midst of a leadership shakeup with Speaker Boehner having announced his resignation and retirement at the end of October and the GOP presidential...

What do you call someone who supports Federal bureaucrats granting rights out of thin air, judges legislating from the bench about how those rights work, and spreads terror about technological progress (along with derogatory comparisons to Uber)? Sadly, some people seem to think you should call them “conservatives.” At least, that’s the only thing I can get out of looking at the so-called conservative opposition to patent reform, which just this week added yet more confusion to the debate when a group calling itself the Conservative Action Project put out a letter slamming the two major patent reform bills making...

Having exhausted their grab bag of scare tactics, untruths, and misleading arguments, patent reform opponents seem finally to have grasped that their stalling is failing. One way or another, patent reform is going to happen. The only question is when and how. However, as a last ditch effort to stop what many of their most unethical members see as the legislative equivalent of a going out of business sign, they have resorted to a rather weak final argument. “Yes, patent reform is needed,” they admit sheepishly, “but not necessarily from Congress. Leave it up to the Courts; after all, they’re...

The following excerpts are from a March 4 speech by Carly Fiorina, chairwoman of the American Conservative Union Foundation and former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, at the Inventing America Conference.My story, a young woman sort of with no plans, not a great resume, getting the opportunity to go from secretary to CEO of the largest technology company in the world. That story is only possible here. And I’ve traveled and lived all over the world, done business all over the world, and it is still true that my story is possible here and only here. And it is because truly of...

President Obama, mired in the worst political stretch of his presidency, can't even get a sure-fire win these days. To say the White House was bullish this winter about the prospects for patent reform would be an understatement. The Republican-controlled House gave Obama a rare victory in December when it overwhelmingly passed a bill to combat patent trolls -- companies that exist mainly to file lawsuits over infringement claims, using vague regulations to score settlements from businesses looking to avoid massive legal costs. Obama then took the rare step of addressing the esoteric issue in his State of the Union...

President Obama signed a bill to help Americans get patents for inventions Friday morning, but in his speech at a science and tech school in northern Virginia, he quickly pivoted to talking about his jobs bill that has rankled both Republicans and Democrats. After acknowledging a handful of members of Congress in his audience at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Obama said he didn’t want to pass up the chance to make another pitch for his plan. “I’ve got another bill that I want to get passed to help the economy right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act,”...

President Obama, the House and the Senate are about to do it to you again! It will happen in less than 24 hours. President Obama will sign the new patent law which is a bailout to a big fancy influential law firm – Wilmer Hale – to cover up and protect them from their malpractice. If President Obama does not sign the bill tomorrow (and he plans to do so to much ridiculous fanfare since it is packed full of deals for special interests), Wilmer Hale could be on the hook for their malpractice to the tune of more than...

On the day we arrived in Washington, April 12, 1997, we tuned in to C-Span just in time to see the House of Representatives pass H.400 on a voice vote. Not one member of the House of Representatives demanded a roll call vote on a bill that would severely emasculate a core function of the federal government. When we were finally able to obtain a copy of S.507, we read it very carefully and we were horrified. Never in all of our years as lobbyists had we ever read a worse piece of legislation. If we had ever wondered what...

...The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world. The Senate passed a similar bill last March on a 95-5 vote. If the bill makes it to the White House for the president's signature, it could be one of the first congressional actions this year to have a concrete effect on business after months...

“Patents would be issued to whoever files applications first and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be allowed to set its own fees under a measure introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives [H.R. 1249],” Susan Decker and Eric Engleman report for Bloomberg. “The proposal, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, is similar to legislation passed by the Senate in a 95-5 vote on March 8. If approved and made law, it would mark a fundamental change in how patents are reviewed and the biggest revision to U.S. patent law since 1952.” “The...

The proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007 will be coming up for a vote in the Senate in a few months. A similar version of the bill has already passed in the House. The bill has certain relatively benign provisions, but let's ignore them since they just cloud the argument and are of little interest to either side in the debate. Let's instead just cut to the chase. In lay terms, the bill makes it easier to challenge issued patents and harder for patent holders to obtain compensation through the U.S. legal system. Regardless of how that sounds to you,...

"Who's that tripping over my bridge?" Thus spake the troll in the famous children's tale "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." Miffed that the goats were encroaching on his property, the troll threatened to gobble them up. But the trolls' adversaries had the last laugh.

Get breaking Internet news straight to your desktop - click here to find out how Amazon.com has been granted three detailed patents covering purchase circles, consumer reviews, and search results in the form of products from multiple product categories. It's a sweeping landgrab which puts e-commerce rivals on the alert. The techniques granted to Amazon.com by the patent office are already ubiquitous on commercial and social networking web sites. Patent 6,963,848 filed March 2, 2000 and granted November 8, covers "Methods and system of obtaining consumer reviews". Patent 6,963,867, filed on March 31, 2003, covers "Search query processing to provide...