The Daily Caller: Fiorina: ‘Don’t Boil The Oceans!’, by Peter Fricke
This post originally appeared in The Daily Caller on March 4, 2015.
Carly Fiorina excoriated a Republican patent reform proposal in a speech to inventors on Wednesday, comparing it to Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.
Fiorina gave the keynote address at the Inventing America conference, at which representatives from universities, companies and non-profit foundations came together to discuss the current state of intellectual property rights in America.
A running theme throughout the conference was the attendees’ animated opposition to the Innovation Act (H.R. 9), a bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte that is intended to discourage abusive patent litigation, known as patent trolling.
According to a statement from the event’s organizers, “[broad] patent legislation, such as H.R. 9 as introduced, that weakens the legitimate enforcement rights of all patent holders will harm our innovation economy, and is unnecessary in light of recent developments in the federal judiciary and executive branch.”
Fiorina took an even more provocative stance, calling the bill a classic example of big government overreach, and claiming that, “if the Innovation Act were law at the time, Thomas Edison would be considered a patent troll.”