Expanding Patent Eligibility hurts innovation and small businesses --- Patent trolls

As important as patent protections are, laws must balance what innovations are eligible to be patented. If eligibility is too narrow, we miss out on incentives to innovate in key areas. If patent eligibility is too broad, however, it will introduce more waste, inefficiency, and abuse into our intellectual property system. PERA would do the latter, resulting in less innovation and small businesses, manufacturers, and farmers falling victim to predatory lawsuits.

United States patent eligibility has long-established guardrails requiring that patented technology be useful, novel, and nonobvious. Among the areas that cannot be patented — for good reason — are laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas.

Advocates for PERA argue that these guardrails are holding the United States back in the global innovation race. In reality, the legislation would upend the patent system, distort productive incentives and open the floodgates for low-quality patents to impede economic growth and innovation.

PERA would allow the everyday practices of farmers and ranchers to be patented. For example, someone could patent the process of using equipment to milk dairy cows or utilizing drones to survey fields.

Farmers across the country would then be vulnerable to a flood of predatory patent litigation demanding payment for infringing on everyday practices, whether it be taking biosecurity measures to protect poultry flocks, using machinery to harvest crops, or even providing adequate water to cattle.

It is a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences and shell companies, known as patent trolls, are primed to take advantage.