The Hill Opinion: No consensus that broad patent ‘reform’ is necessary or helpful, by Adam Mossoff and Devlin Hartline
This post originally appeared in The Hill on March 9, 2016.
Two recent op-eds published in The Hill argue that broad patent legislation—misleadingly labeled “reform”—is needed because the U.S. patent system is fundamentally broken. In the first, Timothy Lee contends that opponents “cannot with a straight face” argue that we don’t need wide-sweeping changes to our patent system. In the second, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine maintain that there is “consensus among academic researchers” that the system is “failing.”
Both op-eds suggest that there are no principled reasons, whether legal or economic, to object to the overhaul of the patent system included in the Innovation Act. Both op-eds are wrong.