Posts Tagged: "114th Congress"

Defend Trade Secrets Act ready for markup in Senate Judiciary Committee

Earlier today the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Defend Trade Secrets Act, which is authored by U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). This is an important issue for Congress because trade secret theft puts American jobs at risk and threatens incentives for continued investment in research and development in the United States. Currently, civil trade secret laws can and do vary state-to-state, and while the differences may not be substantively large it is truly odd that in a global economy the United States has left trade secret law to the States to individually regulate. It is long since time for Congress to act.

Patent Reform – What’s Driving the Patent Legislative Agenda?

Phil Johnson on IPR: “I think with hindsight we might say they made the mistake of relying on the Patent Office to promulgate regulations for fair proceedings for both patent owners and to challengers. And they expected, for example, that the same claim instruction standards would be used in IPRs are as used in the courts. They expected that when the law said that a patent owner could file a reply in the institution phase that it wouldn’t be told oh, no, you can’t include new evidence for that reply. They expected that other burdensome presumptions, including things like consideration of objective indicia of nonobvious would be treated the way it is in the courts, and so on. So in the end they expected that the outcome in IPRs would be approximately the same as in the courts and what we have seen is that that absolutely is not the case and, therefore, it’s not that — necessarily that the law was wrong, it’s that I don’t think pharma decisions and bio decisions have been promulgated properly.”

Misleading patent troll narrative driven by anecdote, not facts

”An anecdote is a snapshot, a one-dimensional shard of the big picture. It is lacking in scale, perspective, and data,” authors Steven Levitt and Stephan Dubner write. I was struck by how well the dynamic of anecdote vs. story captures the heated Washington debate over patent legislation we have witnessed in the past few years. The ”patent troll” narrative — fueled by anecdotal tales of mom-and-pop operations snared by fraudulent patent suits and the image of ugly green trolls paraded from the House floor to the White House – became the conventional wisdom on patents almost overnight. The only ”data” offered to support the narrative were compiled from surveys with unscientific methodologies, nonrandomized survey bases and ill-defined notions of a ”troll” that swept in universities, small inventors and anyone who owned a patent but didn’t manufacture, market and distribute the related product.

A NASA journey to nowhere may be exactly what U.S. needs

It’s unfortunate that NASA has had to operate in such a unfavorable climate, being pushed for more and more answers out of its space exploration program while suffering uncertainty in its federal funding amounts. It would be a mistake for Congress to ground NASA unless fine details on its Mars program are forthcoming. Having a goal oriented target has proven helpful for NASA, but scientific discoveries and the innovations that come therefrom are not easily or even appropriately quantifiable on a spreadsheet, business plan or budget. Historically, NASA space exploration mission objectives have led to great benefits for the American people, even when their plans and mission goals have been a little light on the technical details.

A fear of trade secret trolls is completely unfounded

Fears about trade secret trolls are based in mythology, not on fact. If those claiming federal trade secret legislation would lead to trade secret trolls actually understand trade secret law they simply couldn’t possibly come to a conclusion that there is any risk there will be a single trade secret troll, let alone some kind of zombie-like rise. Simply stated the fear is pure fiction. In addition to seeing absolutely no evidence of trade secret trolls on the State level, trade secrets require a relationship or some nexus between the parties to the dispute. You simply cannot commoditize trade secret litigation in the same way patent trolls can and do commoditize patent litigation.