Patent Law

Pigs in a Poke

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

The phrase above refers to the clueless Congress passing patent laws without any sense of ramifications. Gene Quinn reports ringleaders in the Senate Judiciary Committee making progress on major revisions to their proposed patent reform bill. The damages provision now appears headed toward codification of the Georgia-Pacific factors, a big step forward in terms of sensibility.

The backward leap is in lowering the reeexamination threshold to "an interesting question," as contrasted to its present "substantial new question of patentability." The vagueness is ludicrous. As litigations are sometimes stayed pending reexam, and the patent office is glacially slow about reexams, particularly inter partes, this new reexam criteria could be a death knell for patents, a practical abdication of the presumption of validity that patents presently enjoy by statute, resulting in a purgatory of unenforceability, guilty with no chance to prove innocence.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on March 31, 2009 (boomark / email).