In This Economy, We Need an Innovation-Friendly Environment More Than Ever

The steady loss of IP rights in the United States is alarming. Big companies like Google and Apple tend to preserve or expand their market power and in IP battles, they tend to get their way through their money, influence, friends in high places, and market clout. But for lone inventors and smaller companies, the IP landscape has become forlorn. The patents that were essential for establishing a business and protecting themselves from outright theft (including theft from the big companies that tend to get their way) are now much harder to obtain. Once obtained, they are much harder to enforce. Patent opponents are now given broad new powers to invalidate patents. Incredibly, the IPR system (inter-partes review) that allows a challenger to easily attack an already issued patent is resulting in nearly 80% of challenged patent claims being found invalid.

What this means is that the USPTO, charged with the responsibility of issuing only valid patents, after all the rejections and challenges they give to inventors in the patent prosecution process, is essentially saying that their quality control process is so bad that they have goofed 80% of the time and issued claims that never should have been allowed. Something is seriously wrong here.

The vast new uncertainties in America’s IP system is crushing innovation. Innovators are wondering why they should file in the U.S. Some are going to other nations to launch their business. Others are abandoning hope. This comes at a dark time on the economic landscape when we need innovation and hope more than ever before. Giving Google more power than ever to crush competitive patents is not the answer. Eliminating software and knowledge-economy-based inventions as patentable subject matter is not the answer. Allowing patents to be easily invalidated is not the answer.

Americans need to demand a return to respect for IP rights and create an innovation-friendly society again.

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