Industry heavyweights support U.S. patent reform proposals

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 4/19/2007

Numerous industry heavyweights this week showed support for a patent reform act proposed in both arms of the United States Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate. 

The Patent Reform Act of 2007, a bipartisan, bicameral proposal for patent reform legislation, was introduced Wednesday in the House and Senate. The bill was sponsored in the Senate by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, and Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah. In the House, the bill was sponsored by Representative Howard Berman, a Democrat from California, and Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas.

United States' patent laws are long overdue for refinement, because they were "crafted for an earlier time, when smokestacks rather than microchips were the emblems of industry," Sen. Leahy said at a conference in Washington on Wednesday, according to a Reuters report.

The bill is focused largely on minimizing patent litigation by taking away lawsuits' potential rewards. The reforms proposed in Wednesday's bill make it more difficult for patent holders to claim that intellectual property (IP) has indeed been willfully infringed upon by another company. The bill also indicates that damage awards from patent suits reflect the value of the patented technology, instead of the larger market value of the products in which the IP has been used.

Industry group the Innovation Alliance, which has a member roster that includes LSI Logic, Qualcomm and Tessera, has expressed conditional support for the proposed bill. In a statement made yesterday, a spokesman for the group said while the alliance welcomes patent law reform and that it also hopes to work with Congress to modify the proposed bill to avoid "unintended anti-competitive and innovation-stifling impacts that certain reforms may have."

Meanwhile, the Coalition for Patent Fairness, an industry group whose members include Intel, Apple, Applied Materials, Broadcom, http://www.broadcom  Hewlett-Packard http://www.hp.com and Microsoft, has more enthusiastically voiced its support for the new bill.
 
"Patent reform will contribute immensely to America's competitiveness in a global economy and will reaffirm America's commitment to innovation and consumer welfare," Jonathan Yarowsky, the group's counsel, said in a statement. "The comprehensive changes proposed in the Patent Reform Act of 2007 will strengthen and restore balance to the patent system legislative action that has been urgently needed for years."