Patents are unrelated to IP theft – they only apply within US borders
Charles Duan, 2023 – Adjunct Professor, Assistant Professor (starting fall 2023) and senior policy fellow with the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University Washington College of Law; Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell Tech; member of the Patent Public Advisory Committee, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND STRATEGIC COMPETITION WITH CHINA PART I”, 3/8, https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/duan-testimony.pdf //DH
Among other things, the territorial nature of patents explains why current concerns about IP theft in China are largely unrelated to U.S. patent law.12 By both statute and constitutional requirement, the text of a patent is required to reveal the inner workings of a new technology with sufficient detail such that others are able to make and use the same technology.13 That text is published such that anyone around the world can read the patent, and it makes little sense to say that anyone can "steal" publicly available information outside the ambit of U.S. patent law. Instead, IP theft typically refers to misappropriation of trade secrets and other proprietary information, through industrial espionage or forced disclosures through compelled joint ventures.14 Trade secret and industrial espionage laws would be the proper focus of this Subcommittee's attention to deal with such issues.