Opinions and Editorials


Jul. 26, 2020

Washington Times: Restoring The Gold Standard Of American Innovation Through Patent Legislation by James Edwards

Today’s greatest challenges require our greatest ingenuity and innovative savvy. These require the greatest level of security and reliability of U.S. intellectual property rights.

We’re talking about developing vaccines, tests, treatments and cures for COVID-19, foundational innovations for 5th-generation wireless connectivity and advanced manufacturing processes and machinery employing computers and robotics.

These and more cutting-edge technologies all come in the context of U.S. industrial competitiveness, namely concerning an aggressive China that doesn’t hesitate to use compulsion and crookedness to advance its totalitarian agenda.

Yet, the American patent system has been weakened in recent years.

For example, courts have disfigured the straightforward language of the threshold definition of what’s patentable. Section 101 of the patent law plainly says “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof” is patentable.

But judicially created exceptions, stemming from a string of wrong U.S. Supreme Court decisions, have wreaked havoc to the point of refusing patents for medical diagnostics and computer-implemented inventions. Inventions now not patentable in the United States have been and should be patentable, based on section 101 itself. Such inventions remain patentable in China and other countries.

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