Opposition to patent reform bill in the House continues to organize

To update my post earlier today,  …

Professor Crouch reports today in this post —  First-To-File and the Constitutional Argument – Patent Law Blog (Patently-O) — that two competing groups of legal scholars are in the process of rounding up professors to sign letters to Congress arguing each side of the question of whether the proposed “first inventor to file” system is constitutional.

In the meantime, The Hill is reporting that four representatives — two Republicans and two democrats — have circulated a letter to their colleagues urging them to vote no because of various provisions in the bill that are thought to benefit only special interests and foreign multinational corporations over domestic inventors.   Among the provisions that they oppose are:

• switching to first to file, which small business groups say favors large multinational corporations over small businesses;
• retroactive challenges to financial business method patents that benefit only banks, on grounds that this would create an unconstitutional taking of property;
• retroactive elimination of false marking cases, which Public Citizen believes would remove any disincentive to falsely mark;
• supplemental examination that permits expunging fraud during the original prosecution of a patent, at the urging of, not surprisingly, the generic drug industry; and
• the expansion of the prior user defense, which major universities oppose on grounds that it creates uncertainty for start-up ventures licensing their technology and shifts the system toward favoring secrecy of ideas over their public dissemination.