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28 May 2015Patents

EFF calls for strengthening of IPR rules

Digital rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have called on US politicians to adopt measures that will strengthen the inter partes review proceedings at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The EFF and Public Knowledge are two of four organisations that have attached their names to a letter sent to politicians Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy.

Grassley and Leahy are co-sponsors of the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship Act ( PATENT Act).

The PATENT Act, introduced to the House of Representatives in April, is intended to halt excessive litigation from non-practising entities (NPEs), sometimes referred to as ‘patent trolls’.

Among the key measures in the bill are attempts to clarify pleading standards, curb abusive patent demand letters and increase transparency.

Although the EFF and Public Knowledge support the bill as it stands, they believe it could go further in relation to IPRs.

In the letter, which was dated May 21 but published on the EFF website on May 26, the groups said that the IPR is a “necessary tool” to combat “low-quality” patents asserted by NPEs, but called on the IPR filing fees to be lowered.

It currently costs $23,000 to file a review, an amount the EFF described as “prohibitively expensive”.

In addition, the letter demands that parties challenging the validity of a patent be allowed to appeal against a decision if a patent is found valid following an IPR.

Parties should also be able to challenge patents on the basis of “abstractness” and “lack of definiteness”, the groups said. At the moment patents can be challenged through an IPR on the basis of lack of novelty or obviousness.

“Flushing the system of invalid patents is a task of monumental public interest, and the IPR provisions were specifically intended to advance that public interest,” the letter concluded.

The letter has also been signed by digital rights groups Engine and R Street Institute.

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