The Racine Journal Times Opinion: Two bills in Congress are threats to American innovation, by Lora Halberstadt
This post originally appeared in The Racine Journal Times on November 6, 2015.
Small businesses and inventors should be worried about two bills working their way through Congress. H.R. 9 (the so-called Innovation Act) and S. 1137 (the PATENT Act) are a threat to the innovation that drives our economy, improves our health and improves our lives.
These pieces of legislation are meant to stop a few bad actors from bringing unscrupulous lawsuits, a noble cause in itself, but instead, they create a system that would put such a time consuming and expensive process in place that small businesses and individual inventors would not be able to afford to defend their inventions. Worse yet, these two bills could lead to even more “knockoffs” coming in from China and other countries as inventors find it more difficult to navigate the confusing and expensive process created by this legislation.