Posts Tagged: "small business"

This week on Capitol Hill, the House IP Subcommittee convenes its first hearing of the 116th Congress to discuss a recent report from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on female inventors, and various other House subcommittees will convene hearings to discuss 2020 budget requests for the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Defense. In the Senate, there are hearings scheduled to look at government oversight of electronic health records as well as cybersecurity issues related to small businesses. In the middle of the week, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation will host events that will explore proactive strikes by companies against cyber attackers, as well as how immigration issues are affecting STEM fields. The week closes out with a Brookings Institution event looking at consumer data privacy issues and policy reactions from around the world.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 11th, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing titled Innovation Nation: How Small Businesses in the Digital Technology Industry Use Intellectual Property. Though the witness panel was not quite as one-sided as those seen testifying in front of the House IP Subcommittee in recent years, an informed observer could not help but conclude that yet another opportunity to seriously address the damaged state of the U.S. patent system was missed to the detriment of many of the small businesses which the committee purports to protect.

President Donald Trump signed a new space policy directive for human expansion across the solar system, a directive which hearkens at least slightly back to Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man.” Increased human expansion in space will produce innovations that can improve human life on Earth to the benefit of U.S. consumers, provided our nation’s struggling IP regime can be righted for the proper commercialization of such inventions.

In the past decade, the patent system has been turned on its head. Inventors are now villainized as cartoon characters called patent trolls simply because they assert their hard-earned patent rights against corporations who steal their inventions. These infringing corporations have cleverly cultivated the myth that all patent owners are patent trolls by engaging high-powered lobbyists and public relations firms to loudly attack inventors. This toxic concoction of myth, media and money has gagged opposing voices effectively creating political cover for the government to make rapid and fundamental changes to patent law that skew the field toward big corporations at the expense of inventors and small innovation companies, including those high tech start-ups that are responsible for creating high paying jobs.

you continually hear from Members of Congress, Staffers and those giant companies pushing for weaker patents that the goal of the bill is nothing more than to keep small business owners from getting sued for using pieces of equipment that they purchased. The truth, however, is far different. The small businesses that Congress claims they want to protect are just political pawns in a much larger game of chess. The people funding the effort to enact further patent reform are not small businesses; rather they are Google, Cisco, J.C. Penney, and other giant corporations. The interests important to these giant corporations are driving the push for more reform, not a deep-rooted concern for the plight of American small businesses.

While all job creation is valuable to continued economic growth and development, high-skilled, well-paying jobs are the most impactful for sustained economic progress. Evidence suggests that intellectual property (IP) intensive industries are critical to economic growth and vital to national well-being and global competitiveness. Pham (2010) analyzes the role of innovation and the impact of intellectual property rights on U.S. productivity, competitiveness, jobs, wages and exports. His results clearly point to the importance of IP-intensive industries to economic prosperity.

Carly Fiorina: ‘[W]atch carefully who is supporting that [the Innovation Act]. It’s not the small it’s the big. It’s the big companies whose ongoing economic benefit depends upon their ability to acquire innovations and patents at a lower cost.”