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America Invents Act

Revision as of 22:02, 30 August 2013 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (Like most proposals,)
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In the USA, the America Invents Act (previously called The Patent Reform Act) is legislation that was adopted in September 2011, after numerous rejected proposals starting in 2005. Like most proposals, it changes very little. The USA moves from first-to-invent to First-to-file, slight improvements are brought to post-grant review, etc.

The 2005 proposal aimed to implement proposals from the excellent US FTC 2003 report on innovation, but the proposals got watered down each year until only a minimalist act was passed in 2011.

However, even in its 2005 form, this proposal did not propose the reform we need - it would not end or greatly reduce the granting of software patents by the USPTO. We need to change what can be patented - what areas are "patentable subject matter", to have software removed. This reform may reduce the problem of patent trolls (although as of August 2012 there seems to be no change), but won't have any effect on the harm to standards or on MPEG video formats.

The successive proposals

With links to the Wikipedia articles for each:

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links

News selection

(newest first)

Senate committee hearings