PERA Remains A Serious Threat To Efforts Against Bad Patents
from the bringing-back-patent-trolls dept
As all things old are new again, a bill that would make obtaining bad patents easier and harder to challenge is being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced.
PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow.
Thanks to the Alice decision, courts have invalidated a rogue’s gallery of terrible software patents—such as patents on online photo contests, online bingo, upselling, matchmaking, and scavenger hunts. These patents didn’t describe real inventions—they merely applied old ideas to general-purpose computers. But PERA would wipe out the Alice framework and replace it with vague, hollow exceptions, taking us back to an era where patent trolls and large corporate patent-holders aggressively harassed software developers and small companies.
This bill, combined with recent changes that have restricted access to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), would create a perfect storm—giving patent trolls and major corporations with large patent portfolios free rein to squeeze out independent inventors and small businesses.
EFF is proud to join a letter, along with Engine, the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, Public Knowledge, and R Street, to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing this poorly-timed and concerning bill. We urge the committee to instead focus on restoring the PTAB as the accessible, efficient check on patent quality that Congress intended.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: alice v. cls bank, bad patents, chuck grassley, dick durbin, patent eligible subject matter, patent trolls, patents, pera, software patents, uspto
Comments on “PERA Remains A Serious Threat To Efforts Against Bad Patents”
The problem today is that we’ve had a whole generation of lawmakers without subject matter experts to guide them, such that those making the laws often have no concept of the impact their legal changes will make.
It’s not really the lawmakers’ fault as far as that part goes — they’ve had their staff defunded and they’re beholden to those who can get and keep them elected. There’s only so much each of them and their staff can be a legal expert on, or even know enough to care about, one way or the other.
Even getting rid of lobbyists at this point wouldn’t help, because that would just move lawmakers from taking the point of view of the richest corporations to taking the view shouted the loudest in social media.
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Hahahaha. No.
Idiots elect corrupt pedophiles who whore themselves out for money.
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I mean. Congress could fix this by funding the OTA with, say, $50 billion perhaps. Might seem excessive but for an office that’s intended to “provide early indications of the probable beneficial and adverse impacts of the applications of technology and to develop other coordinate information which may assist the Congress,” I’d think it highly appropriate for such an office. Of course, I’m dreaming, because we all know congress just isn’t going to do that.
AI startups and, more importantly, the incumbents, can go die in a fire. But hey, if this is the example you need to reach the morons in charge in order to stop this latest atrocity of patent law, so be it.
So, does anybody feel like patenting the use of a computer to perform the daily activities of Congress? A separate patent for each task, of course. Submitting a proposal, discussing a proposal, voting on a proposal….
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I don’t think you can patent training an LLM on unfiltered YouTube comments.
I feel like this is just putting in place what is actually in effect.