The House passed the bill amending patent law on Friday, but the Senate has not yet acted on similar legislation introduced simultaneously with the House version, OMB has expressed opposition, and the President may well veto it link here and here. Some of the House rhetoric for and against the law bordered on the extreme, while behind the scene were beneficiaries like Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel and opponents like Caterpillar, Eli Lilley, and Proctor and Gamble. Its not clear which will prevail.

The bill would make several sensible changes: switching from first-to-invent to first-to-file patent grants like other countries; allow post-grant patent challenges for up to a year; allow third parties to introduce evidence against a patent grant; limit where a patent suit can be filed to cut down on jurisdiction-shopping; limit damages to reflect how much the patent violation contributes; and allow immediate appeals of court rulings while a case proceeds. Similar past bills have been introduced only to fail, and no one knowledgeable seems to be predicting the outcome this time either way.

Of interest to this blog:

Quantifying the Cost of Substandard Patents: Some Preliminary Evidence (Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies)

The purpose of patent policy is to balance the incentive to invent against the ability of the economy to utilize and incorporate new inventions and innovations. Substandard patents that upset this balance impose deadweight losses and other costs on the economy. In this policy paper, we examine some of the deadweight losses that result from granting substandard patents in the United States. Under plausible assumptions, we find that the economic losses resulting from the grant of substandard patents can reach $21 billion per year by deterring valid research with an additional deadweight loss from litigation and administrative costs of $4.5 billion annually. This brings the total deadweight loss created by our "dented" patent system to be at least $25.5 billion annually. These estimates may be viewed as conservative because they do not take into account other economic costs from our existing patent system, such as the consumer welfare losses from granting monopoly rents to patent holders that have not, in the end, invented a novel product, or the full social value of the innovations lost.

The full paper on the cost of substandard patents is here. The costs as presented seem greatly understated.