Publications
As Time Goes By – Of Babies and Bathwater
You may have noticed that the topic of the recent Presidents’ Forum, “What to do about NPEs: Do We Risk Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water,” had a familiar ring about it. The title appears to echo that of a paper by Matthew Dowd that won 1st Prize in our Association’s 2006 Conner Writing Competition: “Elimination of the Best Mode Requirement: Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater.”
As far as patent reform legislation is concerned, various factors play a role in the likelihood of throwing out the good with the bad. Political concerns are often paramount. For example, when it came to the legislative debate over best mode prior to the AIA, a Congressional tipping point came in 2007 when the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, mustered ten votes to defeat, by a single vote, a patent reform amendment before the Committee that would have repealed the best mode disclosure requirement.1
1 IPO Daily News, July 20, 2007, at www.ipo.org.