Patent Reform

Recently, John developed a proposal for reforming the patent system. It’s called Patent Durability, and it proposes allowing inventors to tailor their patent protection, and pay fees in accordance with the protection they choose. In today’s system, indigent inventors often complain about the costs of procuring and enforcing a patent, while inventors of lucrative inventions complain that the system is unreliable. Patent Durability solves these problems by creating more trust between inventors and users of their technology. In turn, inventors would be able to realize more money for their inventive efforts, as significant amounts of waste would be removed from the system. It would do this by giving inventors bargaining power (e.g., CHOICE) when they protect themselves, something today’s system does not.

For example, in today’s system, all utility patents offer the exact same protections and cost roughly the exact same amount to procure, depending on which attorney or agent is used. As some of John’s clients have told him that their inventions are worth $500,000 and some have told him that their inventions are worth $5 billion, he wanted to do something so that they could each get and pay for an appropriate level of protection. He wrote four articles (see links below) summarizing the proposal. The first three were recently published in IP Watchdog and the fourth was recently published in LAW 360. Although this proposal would admittedly take many years to implement, if you are an inventor, John would love your feedback on what he came up with. He’d also love it if you told your lawmakers about the proposal. Finally, if you would like for John to speak or participate in a podcast on the proposal, send him an email ([email protected]) to chat about it.

IP Law Pittsburgh

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