Commercial-level, global piracy affects the livelihoods of millions of people. It steals from those holding U.S. jobs in film and TV, for instance. These range from studio executives to hairdressers, theater owners and all sorts of off-camera roles across the country.

Currently, under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s costly and time-consuming to fight piracy.

[Sen. Thom Tillis] introduced S.2140, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, with Senate Judiciary IP Subcommittee Chairman Chris Coons of Delaware. Tillis’s bipartisan bill would resolve confusion by retaining Section 101’s existing statutory categories for patent-eligible subject matter (i.e., process, machine, manufacture, and composition of matter) and by replacing the ambiguous judicially created exceptions with more clearly defined exceptions.

To be clear, the wildly successful, innovation-fostering Bayh-Dole contains no reference to prices of eventual products in connection with the law’s march-in provision or anything else.

But for the fast action of several lawmakers whose experience and expertise in IP led them immediately to spot reasons for concern, PAPA might have been fast-tracked to enactment—blocking Chinese and other adversaries’ use of U.S. patenting with a giant leap away from the Founders’ democratized, merit-based patent system that has marvelously benefitted average Americans who have a novel idea.

"[I]t introduces extensive uncertainty about whether your patents will remain exclusive to your product, your development, and your commercialization efforts over the years with private investment money."

The Global Innovation Policy Center’s new IP principles espouse the vital importance of IP for America’s innovation, security and prosperity. U.S. IP rights “protect America’s global innovation leadership” and make it possible for us to “lead the world in critical and emerging technologies.”

A rash of cookie-cutter op-eds signed by former Congressmen popping up around the country aims to undermine American patent rights on behalf of Big Tech interests.

Two bipartisan bills would restore some patent reliability. Other legislation introduced or seeking a sponsor threatens to reduce patent reliability and America’s global leadership in innovation versus China. 

Quiet title is essential to property rights—whether you’re talking about land where the Environmental Protection Agency asserts unconstitutionally broad “navigable waters” regulations or by unfair eminent domain without just compensation, financial assets unduly taxed (again) at death or taken without due process through civil asset forfeiture.

The EC has proposed a regulatory framework that will hamper standard-essential patents. If you get the sense this is a regulatory train wreck, you’re right. It will harm American and European innovators and help Chinese competitiveness and innovation.

The United States leads all nations for strength on copyrights. The United States ties for 1st place in both the trademark and IP enforcement categories, ties six other nations for 2nd place in IP systemic efficiency, places 3rd on IP commercialization and lands in a 10-way 1st place tie for international treaties that protect IP.

Indeed, the “patent troll” is the monstrous and largely imagined opponent against which these firms have waged an anti-patent war for nearly two decades. The infringers’ lobby wants people to believe that the “trolls” are gaming the ITC, “twisting the Commission’s rules” to “extort legitimate businesses” that import products they manufacture overseas.

If you’re in the business of inventing cutting-edge technologies and participating in standards-development bodies—both activities requiring healthy investments of financial and human resources—then SERA compels you into a deal you cannot refuse. Your only option, if you want to get paid by those whose products need your standard-essential patented invention, is the SERA court.

Several instances of biopharma innovators cutting back or ending promising new drug projects have already occurred. A recent industry survey about the IRA’s adverse effects provides strong evidence that these aren’t merely a few anecdotal moves.

CPR founder and executive director James Edwards speaks on this podcast about his involvement with the film "Innovation Race."

On December 2, the U.S. Supreme Court declined a certiorari petition in Centripetal Networks Inc. v. Cisco Systems Inc. SCOTUS leaves the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s ruling—vacating the federal district court decision that Cisco had willfully infringed Centripetal Networks’s patents and owed damages exceeding $3 billion—in place. Patent owners may fear that this outcome places another hurdle between them and recovering patent infringement damages against established corporations.

Secure private property rights are vital to winning the competitiveness race through innovation. But, among other things, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has upended quiet title for patents.

Regardless of Sen. Leahy’s contributions over the past half century, we shouldn’t let sentimentalism drive the adoption of bad policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to grant certiorari in Centripetal Networks v. Cisco Systems. This patent infringement case swerved into issues of judicial recusal. It has significant consequences for patent owners and inventors targeted by patent infringement, who assert their patent rights and get pulled into a litigation vortex.

Newly enacted government price controls aren’t even implemented yet, but they’re already having an effect. But instead of forcing down the prices of the highest priced (i.e., most valuable) brand medicines, price controls in the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” are reducing biomedical innovation.

Whether you realize it or not, property rights are on the ballot in the midterm elections. Taxes, redistribution of wealth, private property takings, due process.

The original TRIPS waiver didn't help the developing world, and an extended waiver wouldn't either. Further backtracking on international IP protections would merely enrich our rivals, chill innovation, and jeopardize our future health.

A proposal stacking the antitrust deck against standards-essential patents and tilting antitrust enforcement against inventors with SEPs faced broad, bipartisan opposition. A big reason was the dangerous implications for national security.

Thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin, other politicians in his party have seen item after socialist item fall from the budget reconciliation package. The drug pricing provision is socialist policy—the government dictating the price it pays for certain medicines.

Price control schemes encumber private producers’ property rights. They reduce market-based choice and competition for consumers. They curb innovation, quality and value. This socialism comes at too expensive a price.

If you set out to give a gift to Big Tech and the Infringer Lobby, worsen the Administrative State and advantage innovation adversaries like China, it would take some doing to check all these boxes more fully than S. 2891, the “Restoring the America Invents Act.”

A federal judge calls the status of patent-eligible subject matter “validity goulash.” A former chief judge of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals calls it “a quagmire.” The patent eligibility mess is one of the most urgent crises in patent law and policy.

Thirty-one signatories from 29 center-right public policy organizations have warned HHS Sec. Becerra, “Using march-in rights to regulate prices would have a chilling effect on drug development and on other innovative sectors.”

Proposals in Congress would bar U.S. companies from licensing chips to Chinese end-user device companies and restrict U.S. R&D firms from involvement in global standards-development organizations where China’s state-run companies also participate.  Intended to cripple China’s strategic microchip gains, they would actually cripple U.S. leadership in the most critical part of the chip space.

Joel Zinberg’s op-ed “Covid Patients Suffer as Bureaucrats Try to Practice Medicine” (Feb. 8) highlights a sad, avoidable contrast between the Biden administration’s red-tape approach and the property rights-centric, market-based success of Operation Warp Speed.

H.R. 4521, the House-passed America COMPETES Act, sets up a Mother-May-I gatekeeper that will stifle U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Empowering unelected officials to decide whether American companies can invest overseas won't stop China, but it will damage America's economy and plunge us into a vicious retaliatory cycle with other nations.

You’d expect conservatives to approach reining in Big Tech consistent with free enterprise, property rights and innovation principles. Better to strengthen IP than to weaponize antitrust.

.One of the most significant challenges facing our nation today in the emerging battle with China. We must take action to ensure that China does not become the dominant force in global technology leaership.

This Constitution Day, thank the Founders for stimulating ingenuity by applying “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” And while you’re at it, thank an inventor.

The U.S. Supreme Court took a major step in upholding these fundamental rights by striking down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest eviction moratorium extension. 

The executive order calls for “review” of the 2019 Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments. This foreshadows a return to a disruptive Obama-era SEP policy.

President Biden made a big deal in the rollout of his executive order on market consolidation about the price of prescription drugs.  The order weaponizes antitrust and damages the patent system.  That’s not strong medicine.  It’s deadly poison.

“'Patent troll' scaremongering and that narrative’s flimsy evidentiary basis are alive and well and back in use with a vengeance by those who don’t respect patents. But conservative thought leaders are giving an evidence-based perspective on the necessity of reliable patents, meaningful patent rights and how our patent system suffers from 'reforms.'”

"In Supreme Court session postmortems, don’t expect mention of any change in course from the vast injury it’s inflicted over the past dozen years on patent eligibility. Why does this matter? Because the high court has done as much or more than anything to give China an advantage in innovation and industrial competitiveness over the U.S."

"President Biden’s executive order, 'Promoting Competition in the American Economy,' purports to promote competition. Let’s just say the order presumes a whole lot. Its false presumptions lead to policies that weaponize a blunt instrument: antitrust."

"We should give permanency to measures that strengthen U.S. patent rights.  Certainty and reliability of patent policies critically affecting American innovation shouldn’t be subject to radical shifts from one administration to the next."

"China has ramped up a multipronged, whole-of-society strategy to beat America and the West. This goes well beyond mere copying and IP theft. Other prongs include subsidies for Chinese companies, predatory pricing, import restrictions, a biased regulatory regime and economic espionage."

The WTO ploy seeks to waive 1994 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement obligations to protect intellectual property for any inventions related to COVID-19. If successful, the foreign expropriation of U.S. companies’ intellectual property wouldn't be limited to biomedical innovation and would reduce innovation.

Biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical provider organizations have sued the Trump administration over an overreaching rule, called "Most Favored Nation," that imports foreign government-run medical systems’ price controls as a gambit to lower prescription drug prices.  MFN won't.