Hearings Begin in Senate On Patent Reform
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing on "Patent Reform in the 111th Congress: Legislation and Recent Court Decisions" for Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.
A webcast of the hearings will be provided and may be accessed here (link)
The Witness List includes:
Steven R. Appleton
Chairman and CEO
Micron Technology, Inc.
Boise, ID
To view Appelton's written statement, click here (link)
Philip S. Johnson
Chief Intellectual Property Counsel
Johnson & Johnson
New Brunswick, NJ
To view Johnson's written statement, click here (link)
David J. Kappos
Vice President and Assistant General Counsel
Intellectual Property Law and Strategy
International Business Machines Corporation
Armonk, NY
To view Kappos' written statement, click here (link)
Taraneh Maghame
Vice President
Tessera, Inc.
San Jose, CA
To view Maghame's written statement, click here (link)
Herbert C. Wamsley
Executive Director
Intellectual Property Owners Association
Washington, DC
To view Wamsley's written statement, click here (link)
Mark A. Lemley
William H. Neukom Professor of Law
Stanford Law School
Stanford, CA
To view Lemley's written statement, click here (link)
Additional written statements were provided by The Computing Technology Industry Association, and photo sharing company FotoTime. Their statements may be downloaded here and here.
You can also download a zipped file of all the testimony here (link)
Special thanks to Hal Wegner for providing advanced copies of the written statements.
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There is no way to have those PDFs attached to this page?
So that people can link to them?
Not everyone has ZIP support installed by default.
It would even be better to have those PDFs as a text somewhere on a blog.
Only big rich companies and one CAREFULLY selected professor were invited.
No VCs spoke.
No individual inventors.
No university tech-transfer people spoke.
No free software developer spoke.
Next time they should organise a hearing with very small companies and ask them how they navigate the patent thicket, how many patents they read per day to know what they can do and what they cannot do.
When is the last time a lone free software developer was sued for patent damages??? Noone is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in patent litigation fees to sue some lone free software developer.
They WILL and DO sue large corporations like Red Hat (i.e. when they expropriate the property of others), but this is a multi-billion corporation, so spare me the sob stories - if they can afford to lobby congress for 5 years, they can easily afford to carry out a patent search for their products - drug companies do it all the time.
PS - Contrary to the lies written about the patent system, there is no policeman waiting at the corner to arrest people for patent infringement - unlike TM and copyright infringement, patent infringement is NOT a criminal expense that the patentee has to lay out a lot of money to sue.
"When is the last time a lone free software developer was sued for patent damages??? Noone is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in patent litigation fees to sue some lone free software developer."
Threats are enough to get the free guys pull out their source code online:
http://libdca.wikidot.com/
And the purpose of free software is to let corporation do money with it, be it a large one (Redhat) or my small company that does not pay (yet) the patent tax.
"unlike TM and copyright infringement, patent infringement is NOT a criminal expense that the patentee has to lay out a lot of money to sue."
In some countries like Germany it is:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9887955-7.html?tag=newsmap
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