Posted on 09/16/2011 9:22:42 AM PDT by Morpheus2009
(CNN) -- President Barack Obama signed legislation Friday that will overhaul the U.S. patent system for the first time since 1952.
"We have to do everything we can to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit wherever we find it," Obama said at a signing ceremony at a high school in Arlington, Virginia. This measure "cuts away the red tape that slows down our inventors and entrepreneurs."
Obama used the occasion to promote his $447 billion jobs plan, calling patent reform a "part of our (larger) agenda for making us competitive over the long term."
Among other things, the measure, dubbed the America Invents Act, will transition the country to a "first-to-file" system, instead of the current "first-to-invent" approach. Issuing patents to the first person or company to file will help provide clarity in the patent-granting process, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says. It will also prevent inventors from coming out of the woodwork to challenge pending patents.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The perpetual motion machine, affectionately known to insiders as “the Perp”, is expected to have costs near zero after initial startups.
Now that the bill has been passed, where can we find out what’s in it?
Good luck.
FACTIOD: The first “perpetual motion machine” in the world was constructed to handle the U.S. Government’s 2009 Fiscal Budget processing.
A cheater’s mentality. Go figure.
Steve Perlman had a great letter to Boxer & Feinstein opposing the bill. He has over 100 patents and another 100+ pending.
Here's a portion of his Feb. letter.
If patents did not exist, established large entities would be the most able to survive, utilizing other forms of market power to defend their incumbency. Small entities with disruptive technologies, on the other hand, would simply not exist. Anything they would develop could be readily cloned by large entities, who could easily out-market them, and so no investors would ever fund the small entities.S.23 is a Bill whose provisions dramatically favor large entities over small entities. Already, given the massive patent backlog, for many new products, the market window passes long before patents issue, placing large entities at an enormous advantage over small entities. Giving large entities even further advantage until the backlog is resolved will just make matters worse.
But worse than anything, S.23 undermines the uniquely American process of invention. It casually sweeps aside established paradigms that have successfully fueled the engine of innovation in America since its founding, and demonstrably fuels it today. We don’t want American invention to be like that of other countries. We want America to continue to be the world’s mecca for invention.
After 4 sessions of Congress considering the Patent Reform Act, not a single practicing inventor has ever been allowed to testify before the Senate, and only one inventor has testified before the House (and he strongly opposed the Bill). It should come as no surprise S.23 is so disconnected from the reality American Invention.
I urge you to oppose S.23. Focus instead on a much simpler Bill that would allow the USPTO to keep its fees and bring the massive patent backlog under control. After the patent system is functioning normally again, we can sit down and determine what changes would make it better. It is essential that practicing inventors from small entities are a part of this process.
More criticism of the legislation, from practical implications to constitutional questions, at Save Our Jobs
He signed the bill at my alma mater - TJHSST - which is located in Alexandria (technically Annandale) NOT Arlington.
Stupid MSM can't even get their facts straight.
I’m curious. Why hire consultants? Are you willing to elaborate on your recommendation?
Thank you.
You may not believe it but I actually read some of it. Good luck is right.
Big Government ^ | August 30th | Bob McCarty
There is so much more here, please respect this man’s intellectual property by visiting the following link.
http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2011/08/30/patent-reform-act-threatens-engine-of-prosperity/
In early February 1997, I received a telephone call from a longtime friend in Washington. He was calling to say that we were being recruited for a very important assignment, an assignment related to national security.
He explained that, in 1996, the Clinton administration agreed to give the People’s Republic of China a complete set of magnetic tapes from the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office computers, containing every iota of American technology registered with the patent office in the previous 160 years. With the information from those tapes on their computers, the Chinese would know exactly how to make everything we make. But more importantly, by tracking the long-term development of every conceivable kind of technology and extrapolating the path of development into the future, the Chinese could “leap-frog” our own technological development.
No American president could possibly think it was a good idea to do such a thing – unless, of course, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Chinese and he was more concerned about that than he was about the future prosperity of the American people. The American people would never have known how many factories were being built in remote provinces of China, employing workers who were happy to work for two or three dollars a day. When the proposed technology transfer was inadvertently reported in a Commerce Department newsletter, the offer was withdrawn.
But what was potentially more damaging to the United States was contained in a Memorandum of Understanding with the Japanese government, signed by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown… an agreement to introduce legislation in the U.S, Congress that would destroy the U.S. patent system, as we know it. The vehicles for that treachery, already introduced in Congress, were H.400 and S.507, the House and Senate versions of the Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997.
Because the legislation was so thoroughly “wired” on both sides of the aisle, our employers were seeking a small team of experienced government relations professionals who’d been in the political arena long enough that many of their longtime friends had risen to become influential members of Congress. They were looking for lobbyists who were on a first-name basis with members of Congress…. men whose reputations in the political world were such that they could ask members of Congress to take certain actions, on faith alone, and expect those requests to be honored.
What made the task so difficult was the fact that the legislation was supported, not only by the president and vice president of the United States, but by the Peoples Republic of China, the Japanese government, the Indonesian Lippo Group, and 80 or 90 of America’s largest multinational corporations… all but assuring the neutrality of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
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 it was that the Chinese received in return for the millions of dollars they poured into the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996, there was no longer any doubt:
if you are in fact a friendly patent atty I may take you up on your offer regarding advise.
I’m curious. Why hire consultants? Are you willing to elaborate on your recommendation?
A computer security consultant can set you up with monitoring software that records all employee computer usage, and sends you reports of unusual activity (like downloading company files before they quit their job. This can be used to enforce the first. Maybe $100 per year per station the first year, less thereafter.
I can provide names of real people who do this if you Freepmail.
if you are in fact a friendly patent atty I may take you up on your offer regarding advise.
Beelzebubba, is there an “Infringement” provision attached to this new patent law?
Meaning, me the small inventor who has already filed a provisional months ago now meets with “Big Corp” to sell/license the product and Big Corp says we already have prior memos/documents/art that show we have these ideas (no patent though), but have been sitting on it so therefore we have just as much right as you do to the “idea” or product?
As the first filer (your provisional counts for this) you have the rights. usually, the big company will have the faster patent department, but the lesson is to file at least a provisional before you disclose anything to anybody.
Thank you for the reply. Upon clarification I see we are thinking about two types of consultants, one for issues related to personnel and CA but my version for consultants to do projects as opposed to employees. In general, I feel a contract with an employee is more binding and carries less risk than the contract to protect IP via the employee manual. I would rather have consultants and pay them all of the cost of an employee and maybe a little more than to have employees.
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