Senate Vote Tomorrow Could Give Helping Hand to Patent Trolls

I know absolutely nothing about this act, but I was put off by the EFF’s tone of righteousness here. As a rule of thumb I worry when I hear something described in absolute or moralistic terms: rarely do complicated things happen just out of pure villainy.

For slightly more detailed perspective into what proponents might be thinking, CSIS suggests that the status quo effectively allows large companies with armies of lawyers to steal IP from small firms at will, and that PERA seeks to remedy a category of iffy gotcha kind of challenges; the conservative Federalist society claims that PERA would remove a threshold challenge to patent validity but would not disrupt more substantial analyses and tests later in the process.

I still have no opinion personally, but maybe a couple of contrasting opinions might be helpful for folks here.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-efforts-promote-us-innovat...

[1] https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/the-patent-eligibi...

"PERA would remove a threshold challenge to patent validity"

Whatever that means...

Naturally occuring genes can't be patented, but artificial ones can. Theoretically, you'd never have the artificial ones, but yeah, sticky subject.

https://www.science.org/content/article/us-supreme-court-str...

The threshold they are referring to is the Alice/Mayo test.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12563

> The Supreme Court decisions referenced above established what has come to be known as the two-step Alice/Mayo test for patentable subject matter. The first step of the Alice/Mayo test addresses whether the patent claims are “directed to” an ineligible concept (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea). To be directed to an ineligible concept, the focus of the claims must be a patent-ineligible concept, as opposed to a technological process. If the patent claims are not directed to an ineligible concept, then the claims are patent-eligible.

> If the claims are directed to an ineligible concept, then the invention is not patentable unless the patent claims have an inventive concept under the second step of the Alice/Mayo test. Step two considers the elements of each patent claim, both individually and as an ordered combination, in determining whether they contain additional aspects that “transform the nature of the claim” into a patent-eligible application of an ineligible concept. Claim limitations that are conventional, routine, and well understood, such as implementing an abstract idea on a generic computer, cannot supply an inventive concept.

An extremely over-reductive TLDR is that the Alice/Mayo test limits patents to specific, concrete, and well understood applications of technology. The test exists because of overly broad patents that essentially attempted to patent the idea of using a computer to do anything as well as attempting to patent ideas that were not yet invented in the hope someone would invent something infringing so they could extract a payday.

What happens if the genes escape ala Monsanto seeds on the wind?