Big Tech commonly lobbies against PERA
Matich 23 Nick April 5 Nick Matich, a patent litigator in private practice, served as acting General Counsel at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. RealClear Policy “Big Tech Has Eviscerated America's Patent System” https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2023/04/05/big_tech_has_eviscerated_americas_patent_system_891935.html ZMR
But the U.S. patent system has changed dramatically since then, and not coincidentally, just as "Big Tech" started to dominate the technology industry.
First, starting in 2014 with Alice Corp v. CLS Bank International, a series of Supreme Court decisions made it much harder to patent the kind of algorithmic innovations that made Google what it is today. In the years after the Alice decision, for example, denials of AI-related patents on grounds of ineligibility quadrupled. Indeed, under current law, Mr. Page's first patent would almost certainly be invalid.
Lower courts have extended the Supreme Court's precedent to new areas, ruling that even innovations in electric car chargers and garage door openers are actually unpatentable "abstract ideas." Bad law that once affected only tech startups, now impacts potentially any industry.
A bipartisan reform proposal in the Senate crafted by Thom Tillis, R-NC, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, would clear up the murkiness the Supreme Court created. But Big Tech interests are dead-set against it. The less that's patentable, the more Big Tech can lift the work of others without paying.
Second, around 2010, Big Tech lobbied Congress to pass the "America Invents Act," which lawmakers wrote with the intention of streamlining patent litigation. Most notably, the law set up an administrative body that could review the validity of already-issued patents, to confirm whether they were genuinely novel, useful, and nonobvious. One of the architects of that legislation, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, just became the new chair of the House subcommittee on intellectual property.
Unfortunately, Big Tech almost immediately abused the law, by infringing on smaller rivals' patents and then repeatedly filing challenges against those patents. In fact, there are now companies whose entire business is challenging patents on behalf of Big Tech. These professional patent challengers keep their clients anonymous, enabling them to mount repeated attacks on their rivals' patents.