Court decisions that limit patentability of software-enabled inventions weaken protection. The plan effectively reverses these.
Harutyunyan et al, Sunwater Institute Scholar, Economics PhD, 22 (Ani, Edison Innovation Law and Policy Fellow at George Mason University, PhD in Economics, Matthew Chervenak, President of the Sunwater Institute, and Mark Cohen, Senior Fellow at Berkeley Center of Law and Technology, “Measuring Intellectual Property Rights: Existing Indices, Addressing Gaps and Suggestions for Policymakers,” Policy Report #128963 OCTOBER 2022 https://sunwater.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/SWI-Policy-Report-Measuring-IP-Rights.pdf Accessed 7/18/24)
The first problem involves differing national definitions of IP rights. Although TRIPS provides a framework for IP rights harmonization, it authorizes significant flexibility for WTO members to adopt different standards, leading to disparate legal frameworks among countries that could disadvantage the protection or obtaining of IP rights of other trading partners. This disparity in legal frameworks often attracts the attention of trading partners and the scholarly community. For example, recent US Supreme Court cases have had the effect of weakening protections for software-enabled and genetic inventions, while other major patent offices have had more consistent or even liberalizing approaches. There continues to be wide debate regarding whether the “weakening” of the US patent system has led to a decline in innovation in affected areas, or whether it has enabled companies to utilize other mechanisms to protect their innovations and thereby achieve greater freedoms to operate and implement inventions (Madigan and Mossoff, 2016).