In advance of today’s Patent and Trademark Oversight hearing in the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts and IP, several trade associations representing information providers, retailers, and high technology firms sent a letter to Chairman Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Ranking Member Hank Johnson (D-GA) expressing their grave concern over the agency’s whipsaw treatment of inter partes review. Chris Mohr, President of the Software and Information Industry Association, released the following statement:
“Many of the PTO’s proposed actions are not only disappointing, they’re illegal. Congress passed the America Invents Act (AIA) to provide a less expensive way to question a patent’s validity only if the patent was reasonably likely to be invalid. The PTO not only wants to make it harder to challenge bad patents, it seems to want to do so with a complete lack of empirical evidence that such changes are either advisable or necessary.”
