Tomorrow morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a new round of hearings continuing the debate over language in S. 1145, the Patent Reform Act of 2007. While outside support for the bill appears to be evenly balanced with opposition when you take the technology industry as a whole into account, computer and software firms largely favor the bill, with Texas Instruments one prominent exception.
But this morning, a coalition of firms ranging in stature from the Guymon, Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce to Apple, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft urged Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) to pass the bill and get the debate portion over with.
Supporters of the bill, including the Coalition, believe the current system pressures the Patent Office to grant applications that have been lingering in their in-boxes for years, without a substantive review of prior art that would otherwise disqualify them. Challenges to the reviewers' stance take place after the fact, they say, in the courtroom rather than during the review process.
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