Posts Tagged: "Inventor Rights Act"

In mid-December 2019, Congressmen Danny Davis (D-IL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) introduced the Inventor Rights Act of 2019 into the House of Representatives. If passed, the bill would do much to reestablish strong patent protection rights for inventors who own their own patents, giving them an opportunity to opt out of validity trials at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) while also undoing many of the harmful effects of U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as TC Heartland and eBay. While the Inventor Rights Act is directed at a subset of patent owners feeling the brunt of changes to the patent system wrought by Congress and the federal judiciary over more than a decade, the bill does go a long way in correcting the situation for those individual inventors who are likely to have the fewest resources to enforce their patent rights.

The House Small Business Committee met earlier today for a hearing titled “Enhancing Patent Diversity for America’s Innovators,” in which members of Congress heard from witnesses on ways to improve the sizeable patenting gap that exists for women, minorities and low-income individuals. As of 2016, less than 20% of U.S. patents listed one or more women as inventors, while under 8% listed a woman as the primary inventor; only six patents per million people were attributed to African American inventors; and children born to high income families are ten times more likely to obtain a patent than children from below median income families, said Committee Chairwoman, Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY).