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Today the Subcommittee returns to the gift that keeps on giving – patent reform in the 109th Congress. We have devoted much time and energy to this project and I expect progress to continue.
In light of our ambitiousness and the competing interests involved, perhaps it’s not surprising that we haven’t eliminated all differences by now.
I have announced a new round of hearings for this spring with the intent of further illuminating the need for reform and to nudge the process along. That said, today’s hearing addresses patent quality enhancement.
While the Subcommittee has documented a steady increase in application pendency and backlogs at the PTO in recent years, the view among agency officials and the inventor community is that efforts to address these problems should not take precedent over improving patent quality.
Patents of questionable scope or validity waste valuable resources by inviting third-party challenges and ultimately discourage private-sector investment.
At the front end of the system, we can do much to enhance the quality of patents issued by ensuring that PTO is allowed to keep all of the revenue it raises.
While money isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems, American inventors and the public are best served by a fully-funded agency that can devote sufficient resources to hiring outstanding examiners, retaining experienced workers, and modernizing PTO operations.
In addition, every patent reform draft reviewed by the Subcommittee this term has included a provision to allow third-party submission of prior art. This will help examiners to determine whether the inventions under review truly are new and non-obvious.
But no matter how diligent and thorough PTO examiners are, there will always be some patents issued that prompt questions about scope and validity. This is why the Subcommittee is also committed to improving patent quality on the back end of the system. This includes enacting improvements to the under-utilized PTO reexamination proceeding.
Significantly, the Subcommittee also is committed to the creation of a post-grant opposition system that will enable parties to resolve patent disputes in an administrative setting. In other words, concerns about patent quality can be addressed more quickly and less expensively in such a forum compared to litigation in federal court.
I expect we will visit all of these subjects during the course of the hearing, but any matter that speaks to patent quality is fair game for discussion as well. A final comment on how we should examine quality.
It is self-evident that all persons and entities affected by the operations of the U.S. system endorse patent quality enhancement in the abstract. However, actual patent practice frequently involves the competing and conflicting interests of different businesses and individuals.
For example, a software developer might endorse a specific change to the current statutory treatment of injunctive relief or damages computation set forth in title 35. These same revisions would be opposed by a number of patentee interests, especially those in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.
Different entities use the patent system in different ways, depending on their respective business models. It is important to acknowledge this dynamic when reviewing changes intended to enhance patent quality.
This concludes my remarks and I now recognize the Ranking Member for his comments.
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Congressman Smith is the Chairman of Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. Read more about Congressman Smith's positions on high technology.
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