Innovation Act
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Innovation Act of the 113th Congress (H.R. 3309) was a bill that would change the rules and regulations surrounding patent infringement lawsuits in an attempt to reduce patent lawsuits. The version of this bill in the 113th United States Congress was passed by the House on December 5, 2013, but was never passed by the United States Senate. Instead, the Senate responded with several bills, including the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act (S. 1720); in December 2013, the full Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the topic.
In April 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Octane Fitness, LLC v. ICON Health & Fitness, Inc., which shifted lawyer's fees for "frivolous" patent suits to the plaintiff, reducing the incentive to file illegitimate suits in the hope of inducing a settlement. In May 2014, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced he was "taking the patent bill off [their] agenda" due to a failure of the House and Senate to "combat the scourge of patent trolls on our economy without burdening the companies and universities who rely on the patent system every day."
The bill was reintroduced in the 114th United States Congress in February 2015 by its original sponsor, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R, VA-6), as the Innovation Act of the 114th Congress (H.R. 9). That bill would have changed the rules and regulations surrounding patent infringement lawsuits in an attempt to reduce enforceability of patents. It was sent to the House on June 11, 2015 but was not voted by the House or the Senate.
Innovation Act of the 113th Congress
Background
In 2013, patent litigation had significantly increased since 2011, when the Leahy–Smith America Invents Act—the most recent patent law—was passed.
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This entry incorporates text from “Innovation Act” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.