Reform opponents promise patent fight in Senate

The tech industry may have been patting itself on the back Friday, after the House passed a patent reform bill, but the measure still faces an uphill battles in the Senate, opponent claim, InfoWorld reports.

"I would not throw a party just yet," said Bobbie Wilson, director in the litigation department at the Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin PC law firm, based in San Francisco. "Congress has tried to address patent reform before, starting off with a bang and ending with a whimper."

"Remember that there is a whole cottage industry, from the so-called trolls to the patent litigators, who are heavily invested in the status quo," she added. "They will be lobbying hard and spending substantial sums of money to water down or dilute any reform."

Among the opponents is the Professional Inventors Alliance, which plans to fight the bill hard in the Senate. With only a 45-vote margin in the House, the Senate will not see the House vote as a "mandate," Ronald Riley, president of the trade group, said.

Groups opposed to the bill are going to target lawmakers who support the legislation during the 2008 elections, Riley said.

"We don't care if they get mad," he said. "They can't do anything worse to us than they're doing now. There has to be a price for being bought."

Industry posturing aside, lawyer Wilson said the bill is flawed because it ignores the biggest problem with the system -- not enough qualified patent examiners.

While the bill would make "sweeping changes" in the way patents are prosecuted and whether they are litigated, the bill's post-grant review provision targets the wrong point of the patent-issuing process, she said.

"That's kind of like closing the barn after the horse is gone," she said. "Most of the problem is with bad patents."

Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat, has also introduced a bill to increase funding at the Patent and Trademark Office.