Wausau Daily Herald Letter to the Editor: Patent changes would hurt American businesses, by Deb Koncel
This post originally appeared on Wausau Daily Herald on January 26, 2016.
EDITOR: With a lot of talk in the presidential primary being centered around our competitiveness with countries like China, two bills working their way through Congress will all but ensure that our foreign competitors will get the upper hand.
The bills, S 1137 and HR 9, would change the process for protecting small business or inventor patents. Under these bills, the process to defend a patent in court would become so expensive and complicated that it would make it nearly impossible for small businesses and individual inventors to protect their property. While this may be fine for the mega-corporations that can afford a team of high-priced lawyers, for everyone else, it means their products undoubtedly will be knocked off by foreign competition while they are helpless to protect the inventions they put so much time and money into.