Hal Wegner's E-Book on Effect of Patent Reform on Prosecution

-Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service

Assuming the Leahy-Smith "if you want it, we will sell it" patent bill passes, in some compromised, fee stealing version, part of the new legislation will have a very significant impact on patent prosecution. Which means (despite OMB nonsense calculations to the contrary) significant impact on the costs of seeking patents, while providing neither a lower pendency time nor higher quality patent for the applicant - pay more, and probably get less.

To help you prepare to pay more to get less, Hal Wegner of Foley and Lardner has written a 100 page book focusing mostly on that part of the patent reform bill, Section 3, that will have a great impact on prosecution costs. His book is available at: www.bustpatents.com/WegnerBook.pdf

The first part of the book is pretty much the text of relevant sections of the bill, the House version which is now on the Senate Calendar and would become the new patent law if approved by the Senate and signed by the President.  The book analyzes the key wording in the statute, such as "public use", by providing excerpts from leading cases which interpret the key wording as a guide to how the wording will be interpreted in the new law.

It is a very useful guide to the impact of this crap bill.

I still hope that Hal's book will be completely, absolutely, totally very useless in the sense that you actually never need to ever make use of it.