Massie: Patent rights battle ‘will go on forever’

[October 12, 2015]  By Josh Peterson / October 12, 2015 /  

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Inventor-turned-politician Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) warned last week that the patent system’s opponents will renew their fight to weaken the patent system despite being stalled in the House of Representatives before the August recess.

During an interview on Oct. 7 sponsored by the Save the Inventor coalition, Massie, trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the battle to weaken the patent system “will go on for another 100 years.”

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“There will always be some of the big companies that are up here with a lot of money trying to weaken the patent system and somebody’s got to be here,” said Massie.

Painted in the mainstream media as a fight to protect the small inventor in the garage from abusive litigation, innovation advocates and conservative organizations have criticized the so-called patent reform movement as a gift for China and large multi-national corporations like Google.

As Watchdog.org previously reported, Maureen Ohlhausen, Republican Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, told audience members at an August policy conference in Iowa that the Chinese government was actively working on a global level to weaken intellectual property rights in order to make conditions more favorable for its state-owned enterprises around the world.

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“Hopefully when I’m gone there’ll be people elected that will stand up for the little guy who doesn’t have a lobbyist here to protect them and their intellectual property rights. But this battle will go on forever but right now we’ve had a temporary victory in the House where we slowed down the bad patent legislation,” said Massie.

Whereas the House’s Innovation Act (H.R. 9) has been stalled since July, the Senate companion bill, the PATENT Act (S.1402) made it onto the Senate Legislative Calendar at the beginning of the second Week of September.

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Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who also participated in the interview, agreed with Massie, stating, “There are very strong economic interests that are trying to weaken the patent litigation system.”

“They see the economic consequences to them of patent litigation in a series of high tech sectors but it has a very different impact in pharma and bio and materials for universities, for venture capitalists and those folks are opposed to fundamental and sweeping changes in patent litigation,” said Coons.