CONGRESS IS TRYING TO KILL THE INDEPENDENT INNOVATOR

Congress is currently creating new legislation to reform our patent system. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the proposed legislation would make life more difficult for entrepreneurs by rewriting the rules for getting patents, making them more vulnerable to challenges, and limiting damages when they are infringed.
Nobody doubts that the system is troubled. The backlog of pending patents is approaching a record 800,000, and average approval time has stretched to 31 months. For 15 years Congress siphoned off a chunk of PTO fees, which now run about $1.7 billion annually. Patent quality has suffered as overburdened and underpaid examiners have granted protection to broad and seemingly obvious business-process "inventions," such as Amazon.com's checkout cart for online shopping. Patent litigation is too common and too costly.
The proposed bill, sponsors say, will cure these problems by improving patent quality. As a result, "the bill will reduce meritless lawsuits," says Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is co-sponsoring the bill.
The problem is that in the guise of addressing common concerns, the legislation favors corporate interests over independent inventors.
It starts by replacing the uniquely American "first to invent" rule with "first to file," which is used in Europe and Japan. First to invent gives you time to fully develop a concept and still be confident of winning a patent, if you can prove you hatched the idea first. By contrast, first to file "would create a race to the courthouse that big companies with their legions of staff experts will always win," says Alexander Poltorak, CEO of General Patent, a Suffern, N.Y., patent-enforcement firm.
Adopting the foreign model moves U.S. policy in the wrong direction, says Jere Glover, executive director of the Small Business Technology Coalition. "Our patent laws make America stand out as pro-inventor and pro-entrepreneur," he says.