There’s no patenting advantage to relocate overseas
David Jones, 2024 – executive director of the High Tech Inventors Alliance. Questions for the Record from Senator Thom Tillis , Hearing on “The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act – Restoring Clarity, Certainty, and Predictability to the U.S. Patent System” 1/24, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-23_-_qfr_responses_-_jones.pdf
4. One of the key concerns from innovators is that, absent additional clarity in this space, we’re going to start seeing American companies start developing their inventions overseas in jurisdictions which have broader standards of patent eligibility. Do you agree with that concern and, if you do, what evidence have you seen to suggest that technological inversion is already occurring?
The TRIPS agreement requires that all signatories treat foreign inventors and patent owners exactly the same as domestic ones. This means that an American company would gain absolutely no legal advantage from moving its development activities to another country because it would be treated no differently by the U.S. or any of the other 163 signatories. So, to the extent that this could theoretically be a problem, there would have to be a concern that American companies were moving development to one of the very small number of nonsignatory countries, which is simply not the case.