[tcoxaz]

If you have Amazon Prime, check out The Patent Scam. These parasites are disgusting.

[House Atreides]

“...limiting section 101 of the Patent Act this way made a lot of frivolous patents vanish in a puff of logic, which in turn prompted all sorts of cries of horror from trial lawyers.....”
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Anything engendering cries of horror from trial lawyers makes me happy — though there could be scattered exceptions to that rule.

[Jagermonster]

The premise of this article is exactly 100% wrong. Congress has the constitutional power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Congress has used this power to create a patent system. The early U.S. patent system was plagued by an activist Supreme Court that consistently deemed itself the arbiter of what was "inventive," and what was not. The Supreme Court developed doctrines that described certain categories as not inventive, including "abstract ideas," "laws of nature," and"natural phenomena" The Supreme Court rarely every found any invention to be inventive enough to deserve a patent. This caused patents to be regarded as a fools errand, and removed much of the incentive to inventors.

In 1952, the Congress had had enough, and replaced the arbitrary 'inventive' standard with the modern 1952 Patent Act, which provided specific requirements for what was patentable, and what was not. "Inventiveness," "Abstract Ideas," "Laws of Nature," and "Natural Phenomena" were deliberately excluded from the act.

The Supreme Court could not be broken of its addiction to these "judicial exceptions" to the patent act, and gradually reintroduced the concepts in case law. Alice v. CLS Bank was just the final straw that broke the camel's back, and has caused a huge s#!tstorm in computing and medical patents. This is despite the Supreme Court's express recognition that it has no authority to make up judicial exceptions to statutes.

Alice, and all the Judicial Exceptions cases that led up to it, are bad law, and I applaud Senators Tills and Coons for actually working to do something about it. Their proposed draft amendment to Section 101 of the Patent Act is good, and would fix the many problems caused by the Supreme Court. They also added proposed amendments to Sections 100 and 112 that are not good, and are in fact downright bad. I suspect that the Section 100 and 112 amendments were last minute additions proposed by lobbyists. I expect that they will be removed or significantly re-worked in the next revision.

[ryderann]

Those of us in NC are embarrassed we put Tillis in office. I’m soooo ashamed of him and Burr. On the other hand, Meadows is MY representative.

[null and void]

Novel, useful and non-obvious is a pretty succinct and good criteria.

(s) nully, who has several patents...

[Brian Griffin]

The patent system really should be eliminated except to protect specific single molecular entities pending FDA approval as a marketable drug and for say 17 years thereafter.

There are thousands of really smart people capable of solving even very tough problems.