Posts Tagged: "Congress"

Senators Tear into Facebook and Google Reps During ‘Big Data, Big Questions’ Hearing on Competition and Privacy

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights held a hearing yesterday titled “Big Data, Big Questions: Implications for Competition and Consumers,” in which both Republican and Democratic senators pushed representatives of Facebook and Google to answer difficult questions about their platforms’ impact on everything from competitive marketplaces to teenagers’ body image. The hearing is one in a series that aims to conduct a bipartisan review of America’s competition issues, according to Subcommittee Chair, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

New Tillis-Leahy Bills to Boost Innovation: The Good, the Bad and the Nonsense

Earlier today, U.S. Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Ranking Member and Chair of the Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee, introduced a pair of bipartisan bills that the Senators say are aimed at improving the participation Americans from all backgrounds in the patent system and ensuring that the public knows the true owners of patents. If enacted, the Unleashing American Innovators Act (UAIA) would require the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to establish another satellite office within three years somewhere in the Southeastern region of the nation, which the bill specifically defines as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Of course, given that the main campus of the USPTO is located in Alexandria, Virginia, it would seem unlikely that Virginia would be the final destination of any Southeast Region satellite office. The UAIA would also require the Director to determine within two years whether any additional regional satellite offices are necessary to— in the words of the bill— “achieve the purposes described in section 24 23(b) of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act… and increase participation in the patent system by women, people of color, veterans, individual inventors, or members of any other demographic, geographic, or economic group that the Director may determine to be underrepresented in patent filings.”

This Week in Washington IP: Anticompetitive Acquisitions in Big Data, Copyright Protection in the Digital Age, and Connecting U.S. Innovation with National Security

This week in Washington IP news, various committees at the House of Representatives will meet to discuss the future of NASA’s activities in low-earth orbit, efforts to advance earth system science at NOAA and preserving consumer rights to access personal financial data. Over in the Senate, the Antitrust Subcommittee will follow up on the Federal Trade Commission’s recent activities to rein in anticompetitive behaviors in the high-tech industry. Elsewhere, the Hudson Institute explores what effective copyright protection should look like at this point of the digital age, and the Center for Strategic & International Studies focuses on ways to ensure that U.S. technological competitiveness continues to effectively address national security concerns.

U.S. Embassy Failures, COVID-19 Travel Restrictions, Keep Attorney Working on COVID-19 Technology Out of United States

Surely there can be no greater national interest to the United States than to allow each and every single person working to solve the COVID-19 pandemic to cross our border without issue, especially those who have already earned visas to work in the United States. However, a series of unfortunate events and policies has resulted in an ironic situation in which, in one example, an attorney from Sweden, who has spent significant periods of time within the United States since 2006, cannot return to the states to sit for the patent bar; aid members and clients of her law firm who are needful of her unique skills, including one colleague who is undergoing medical treatment for a serious health condition; or prosecute several patent applications representing some vital advancements in the fight against COVID-19. U.S. Embassy inaction, which is blocking her ability to take the U.S. patent bar, join her colleagues in the U.S. who have mentored her in this field for a year-and-a-half, and work on these COVID-19 patent solutions, arguably threatens the very chance of those inventions and technologies being properly commercialized to benefit everyone in the United States and beyond.

Celebrating (?) the America Invents Act: Ten Years On, Many IP Stakeholders Say it’s Time for a Second Look

During IPWatchdog LIVE 2021 in Dallas, Texas, I asked a handful of willing attendees for their thoughts on the impact of the America Invents Act (AIA) in anticipation of today, the ten-year anniversary of the day President Barack Obama signed the AIA into law. I began writing for Managing IP magazine in 2007 and remember well the lead-up to the law. The discussion centered mostly on the change from a first-inventor-to-invent to a first-inventor-to-file system, which was seen as a way to harmonize the United States with the rest of the world, but which many feared would be detrimental to U.S. innovation. Some of the most controversial provisions were ultimately dropped in order to get the law through Congress, and overall, the IP world was celebrating on September 16, 2011, that at least some action had been taken on reforming, and ostensibly strengthening, the U.S. patent laws.