AIPR Opposes Proposed Legislation that Would Apportion Damages, Increase Post-Grant Opposition and Change from the American First-to-Invent Regime

Opponents Point Out That Two Obama Administration
Officials Have Ties to IBM and Microsoft

New York, NY, October 19, 2009 – American Innovators for Patent Reform (AIPR), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and defending American innovation, congratulates Dr. Forrest Bird, inventor of the respirator and other medical devices, on receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

October 9, 2009 - Yesterday the USPTO announced in a press release that it has rescinded a patent regulations package first proposed in 2007 in the Federal Register.

Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos has signed a new Final Rule rescinding the regulations.

Had the new rules passed, they would have limited the number of continuation applications an inventor could file, as well as the number of claims that could be included in each application.

On September 4, 2009, Scott A. Shane wrote an incisive post in the New York Times' "You're the Boss" blog about how the proposed changes in the Patent Reform Act of 2009 would negatively affect entrepreneurs. Specifically, Shane refers to the proposal to recalculate patent damages in a way that reduces the amount a patent owner could collect in the event of infringement.

David Kappos - whose full title is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) - has worked with the USPTO's Joint Labor-Management Task Force to develop a series of proposals that would both reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a patent examination and improve morale among USPTO employees.

August 31, 2009 – Seasoned editor and journalist Mike Drummond has joined the Board of Directors of American Innovators for Patent Reform (AIPR), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and defending American innovation. Mr. Drummond is the editor-in-chief of Inventors Digest Magazine, the longest-running publication serving the invention industry.

New York, NY, July 9, 2009 – Dr. Pat Choate, a prominent economist, best-selling author, former vice presidential candidate and noted intellectual property expert, has joined the Board of Directors of American Innovators for Patent Reform (AIPR). Dr. Choate, currently director of the Manufacturing Policy Project, a Washington, DC-based policy institute, has thrown his support behind an organization that represents American innovators – inventors, scientists, engineers, researchers and intellectual property service providers – in the ongoing struggle to enact meaningful patent reform.

Patent attorney Barry Chapin of Chapin Intellectual Property Law LLC in Westborough, Massachusetts, wrote this editorial in the Worcester Business Journal of Worcester, Mass. Chapin argues that changing the patent code to punish so-called "patent trolls" will have an adverse, perhaps even crippling, effect on independent inventors who patent their inventions but lack the money to produce them and thus license their patents to larger companies.

The National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) has posted on its website a letter that the organization's leaders sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in opposition to S.515, the Patent Reform Act of 2009.

The letter urges the Senate to withhold floor time for S.515 until more revisions have been made, as the current form of the bill would adversely affect small entities and individual inventors.