Patent eligibility limitations are shifting investment and technological leadership to other countries
Andrei Iancu, 24 – Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell; former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Responses to Questions from Senator Alex Padilla, before the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property in the Senate Judiciary Committee, “The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act – Restoring Clarity, Certainty, and Predictability to the U.S. Patent System” 1/23, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-23_-_qfr_responses_-_iancu.pdf //DH
RESPONSE TO QUESTION 6: After the recent U.S. Supreme Court cases on patent eligibility, the patent systems of the United States’s economic counterparts currently allow for the patenting of a broader range of innovation; academic scholarship has confirmed this assessment with a survey of patent applications that have been granted in the EU and China but not in the United States.13 These trends are mirrored by shifts in capital investment from the United States to these other regions.14
Collectively, this data provides a concerning, early-stage warning of a shift in technological leadership to these other countries—companies are most likely to want to be located where they can secure returns on their investments in research and development, and venture capital is most likely to want to invest in those geographic locations as well. As new technology hubs are created, they are naturally the destinations for the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. While the U.S. has established technology hubs already that may obscure the beginning of this shift elsewhere, it will take the U.S. a long time to recover if the next generation of technologies are based on innovation centers in other countries.