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PublishedSeptember 17, 2013

Senate Judiciary Committee Leadership Calls For Patent Reform in Politico

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) of the Senate Judiciary Committee have a new op-ed in Politico about the abuses of our patent system, and their intent to fix it.  They explain that the U.S. patent system is no longer fulfilling its constitutional duty of promoting progress, and is instead harming our economy.  They don’t use the term “patent trolls” or even “patent assertion entities,” rather calling them “patent abusers” who file “predatory lawsuits,” and “bad actors.”

Congress is working on a bipartisan, bicameral level, as it did in the 2011 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, and their “legislation will increase the transparency of patent ownership, protect the customer of a patented product when the manufacturer should really be the defendant and improve the process for reviewing patents at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.”

We are pleased to see Congress publicly calling for reforms, and look forward to reading the latest drafts from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee.

Ali Sternburg

, CCIA

Ali Sternburg is Vice President, Information Policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, where she focuses on intermediary liability, copyright, and other areas of intellectual property. Ali joined CCIA during law school in 2011, and previously served as Senior Policy Counsel, Policy Counsel, and Legal Fellow. She is also an Inaugural Fellow at the Internet Law & Policy Foundry.

She received her J.D. in 2012 from American University Washington College of Law, where she was a Student Attorney in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, President of the Intellectual Property Law Society, Senior Symposium Chair and Senior Marketing Manager for the Intellectual Property Brief, and a Dean’s Fellow at the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property.

She graduated from Harvard College in 2009 where she studied Government and Music, wrote her senior honors thesis on “Theoretical and Legal Views on U.S. Government Involvement in Musical Creativity Online,” and interned at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

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