This was a very disappointing week for patent reform. On Wednesday, we found out that Senator Leahy took patent reform off of the Senate Judiciary Committee agenda for the month. That doesn’t mean it’s permanently off the table, so please let both of your Senators know you support patent reform! If you need more evidence of how the Senate can help, earlier this week Matt explained how the Lex Machina study I mentioned last week demonstrated how reforming discovery rules could really rein in patent trolling.
Despite Wednesday’s announcement, yesterday the House Energy & Commerce Committee held a hearing on demand letters. Public Knowledge’s Charles Duan live-tweeted it at @charles_duan, and you can also scan the #fixpatents hashtag for more insights.
And in other news, last Friday night it was announced that Apple and Google are settling all of their patent reform disputes, which is one big step to ending the smartphone patent wars.
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