Posts Tagged: "Patent Reform"

Gene Patent/Drug Pricing Concerns and Unintended Consequences Dominate Second Senate Hearing on 101

Wednesday’s Senate hearing on patent eligibility reform, which began more than 30 minutes late due to votes on the floor, opened with Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) reiterating that his goal in holding three hearings on this topic and receiving testimony from 45 witnesses, which is not common, is to address the major concerns on all sides of the debate. Tillis noted that he and Coons had specifically invited many of the high-tech companies that do not appear on any of the rosters for the three hearings, but they chose not to participate and instead to be represented by David Jones, Executive Director of the High Tech Inventors Alliance (HTIA), who spoke today. While Tillis said, “that’s ok,” he noted that “silence is consent. What we want here is people working out of the shadows, collaboratively.” HTIA’s members include Amazon, Google, Adobe, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Dell, and Salesforce. Many of today’s panelists raised more substantive issues with the proposed section 100(k) and 112(f) than did yesterday’s speakers. Section 100(k)defines the term “useful” in the new section 101 and section 100(f) would eliminate functional claiming. Barbara Fiacco, representing AIPLA; Henry Hadad of Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) President; Paul Morinville of U.S. Inventor; and Phil Johnson, representing the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, all raised various concerns about one or both of these sections. Notably, Hadad said that IPO has not yet taken an official position on the draft, although it meshes with its own 101 proposal, and Fiacco said that AIPLA feels 112(f) and 100(k) are areas for “further consideration.” In addition to Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Tillis, Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked several questions of the panelists.

Industry Speaks: Roster for Last Senate Hearing on 101 Released

In the midst of the first two hearings on reforming patent eligibility law, the Senate IP Subcommittee has published the witness list for next week’s final hearing on Section 101 reform, to be held on Tuesday, June 11. Again, it is decidedly pro-patent compared with previous congressional hearings on patent issues. As with the first two hearings, the Senators will hear from three separate panels of five witnesses each. The first panel will include Manny Schecter of IBM, who has noted in past articles for IPWatchdog that some of the most groundbreaking inventions of our time would likely fail or be invalidated under the current patent eligibility landscape. He will be joined by Laurie Self, Senior Vice-President and Counsel, Government Affairs, at Qualcomm; Byron Holz, Senior Intellectual Property Rights Licensing Counsel at Nokia; Kimberly Chotkowski, Vice President, Head of Licensing Strategy and Operations at InterDigital; and Sean Reilly, Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel at the Clearing House Payments Company.

First Senate Hearing on 101 Underscores That ‘There’s More Work to Be Done’

The first of three scheduled hearings in which the Senate IP Subcommittee will hear testimony from a total of 45 witnesses on the subject of patent eligibility law raised many questions. While some read the proposed draft bill released by Congress last month as clearly overturning AMP v. Myriad, for example, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), Ranking Member of the Senate IP Subcommittee, said today that was not his intention. In his opening statement, Coons pushed back against an article published on Monday by The Washington Post, which indicated that the proposed draft bill to revise Section 101 would enable the patenting of genes. Coons called the article “significantly misleading” and noted that “our proposal would not change the law to allow a company to patent a gene as it exists in the human body. I believe I speak for the Chairman and myself when I say we do not intend to overrule that holding of the 2013 Myriad decision.” The concerns leading to the Washington Post article arose in recent days, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a statement and held a phone briefing for Congressional staffers claiming that the proposed draft bill would enable the patenting of genes. Sherry Knowles, Principal of Knowles Intellectual Property Strategies and one of the witnesses at today’s hearing, penned a rebuttal of the ACLU’s position that IPWatchdog published on Monday. Knowles spoke in the second panel of today’s hearing and said she hopes the proposed bill would in fact overturn the Myriad decision because “there’s been a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products. The highest public interest is life itself and that has to be the goal of this statute.”

Todd Dickinson: SCOTUS Has Denied 42 Section 101 Petitions Since Alice, So It’s Up to Congress

The first of three hearings on patent eligibility reform is now underway; Q. Todd Dickinson, former USPTO Director and Senior Partner at Polsinelli, was one of the first to testify, and in part emphasized to the Senate IP Subcommittee that the courts have shirked their duty to address this issue, so Congress must. Dickinson provided the Subcommittee a list of the 42 cases that have been denied cert by the Supreme Court since Alice and said that the current situation”encourages picking winners and losers” and actually pushes companies and inventors towards trade secrets.

Sherry Knowles Responds to ACLU’s Urgent Phone Briefing and Letter Opposing Reform to Section 101

This morning, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which will be represented in Wednesday’s hearing on Section 101 reform by Senior Legislative Counsel Kate Ruane, announced an urgent phone briefing for members of Congress and staff to address the contention that the “Proposed Patent Bill Would Jeopardize Health Care and Harm Medical Research.” The phone briefing, which all interested stakeholders should join, takes place today at 2:30 pm EST and will be jointly held by representatives from the ACLU, the Association for Molecular Pathology, a breast cancer survivor and patient, My Gene Counsel, and Invitae. Anyone who would like to listen should dial in to the number provided here. Below, Sherry Knowles, a well-known patent attorney, policy expert and also a breast cancer survivor, rebuts the arguments made in both the ACLU’s briefing announcement and associated letter to Congress on this topic.