Mucky Mucks Mount Summit Offensive Against US Patent System

[Congressman] Berman [D-CA] is optimistic about the prospects of getting enough Republican votes to pass a [Patent "Reform"] bill in this year's new Democratic Congress. The tech industry will be thankful if some legislation makes it through soon that would get the sand out of the patent processing gears..

Yup, according to this unbiased report about the invitation-only Tech Policy Summit, the most prestigious leaders of world wide technology have hob nobbed together, looked deeply into the heart of the patent system, spotted its "gears" and found that "the system is broken" because there is sand in the gearbox.

Thank goodness. At least somebody is doing the hard hard quality work of collecting numbers, collecting facts, and arriving at rationalized assessments. You would hate to think that our "leaders" are not paying attention to all the unemotional evidence and instead they are being run rougshod over by the K street mind benders.

According to yet another report:

Congressman Howard Berman from Los Angeles, the chairman of the House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee on courts, predicted that the new Democratic Congress would deal with patent reform during the current legislative session. In an on-stage interview at the Tech Policy Summit with Time magazine national political correspondent Karen Tumulty, Berman noted that the pharma companies have opposed patent reform while the tech companies favor it. Berman said that Republicans in league with the pharma companies here-to-date held up the patent reform bill. But technology and financial services companies joined forces to create a groundswell of support for reform. He said that current patent office practices can be detrimental to innovation and the growth of the economy. He is troubled by business method patents and other frivolous patents such as the Double Click patent. .

Yet another unbiased observer was troubled that the Mucky Mucks were "trying to make patent trolling respectable". Obviously the panel failed to realize that "the current patent system had a chilling effect on patent infringement." My oh my. Something needs to be done about this. We can't have a system that chills infringement! "[N]o one on the panel was willing to note that the patent system all too often represents a net negative to innovation." Some more "dirt" on the Summit can be found here. And here and here.