Posts Tagged: "Senator Mike Lee"

Earlier today, by a vote of 94 to 5, the United States Senate overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century Cures Act. Having passed in the House, the Cures Act now goes off to the White House for the President’s signature, where it will receive a warm reception. “I’ll sign it as soon as it reaches my desk, because like a lot of you I’ve lost people I’ve loved deeply to cancer,” President Obama said in his weekly address on December 3, 2016, as he called upon Congress to act swiftly to pass the legislation and send it to the White House.

The Review the Rule Act of 2016 was introduced into the U.S. Senate by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), which would delay amendments to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 set to go into effect on December 1st… The proposed changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, which governs the process for legal searches and seizures of criminal evidence, contraband and criminal suspects, were proposed to both houses of Congress this April by the U.S. Supreme Court in a letter to both houses of Congress from Chief Justice John Roberts. The changes to Rule 41 would give a magistrate judge in a district where activities related to a crime may have occurred the authority to issue a warrant to remotely access electronic storage media to copy electronic records even if the electronic storage media may be outside of the judge’s district.

When patents were brought up in the hearing, however, it seemed to focus mainly on their effects in the pharmaceutical world. Ramirez’s prepared remarks for the hearing touched on pay for delay in pharmaceutical patent infringement settlements, and she noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2013 decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis has given the FTC a greater capacity to challenge pay for delay schemes in court. Ramirez also stated that a report on the FTC investigation into patent assertion entities (PAEs) will be made available sometime this spring.

In the Senate the Judiciary Committee is where any action relating to intellectual property reform will be played out. Key Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee, including Senators Grassley, Cronyn and Hatch, are on record as saying that more patent reform is on the horizon. Thus, the question is not if the Senate will take up patent reform during the 114th Congress, but rather how quickly it will be brought up in Committee. Additional patent reform in 2015 seems like a nearly foregone conclusion, but when everyone starts thinking that patent reform has a way of going no where fast, or at least that has been the history of patent reform in Congress.