Surprise Amendment Would Have Gov't Explore Whether Business Model Patents Should Be Ditched

from the didn't-see-that-coming dept

We had noted that Senator Patrick Leahy was doing the Groundhog's Day thing of reintroducing his flawed patent reform proposal that doesn't actually address the problems of the patent system. He does this every year, insisting that this will be the year it's passed, and nothing ever actually happens. But, in a bit of a surprise move, Senator Chuck Schumer (who does not have a good history on curtailing IP-law abuses -- but rather has a history of expanding them), apparently introduced an amendment that at least opens the door to ending business model/business method patents.

It doesn't go there completely, but would "authorize a pilot program for review of business method patents." I'm not quite sure how you have a "pilot program" to study whether or not business method patents should be valid, but I'm surprisingly encouraged by the idea of actually running some sort of test program to get actual data to determine whether or not a particular program makes sense. Of course, given that it sounds like it makes sense, I'm guessing that either it will quickly get rejected or the details will show that it's really not what it appears to be at first glance.

Separate from this, there's apparently another amendment that narrowly focuses on banning patents on tax strategies. We've already noted how there's been an explosion of "tax strategy" patents in the last few years, and Congress has tried to carve them out before as well. As I said last time, while I think tax strategy patents are a really bad idea and shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, I'm troubled by specific types of exemptions, rather than trying to fix the actual patent system that allows tax strategies to be patented in the first place. Cutting out just tax strategy patents is a duct tape solution that ignores the larger problem.

Filed Under: business methods, congress, patents, tax strategies

Congress Trying To Make It Legal To Ignore Tax Planning Patents

from the wrong-approach dept

We've written a few times about the rush to patent various tax strategies. That, by itself, should be evidence enough of some of the problems with the patent system. However, rather than deal with those larger problems, it appears that our Congressional Representatives are trying to take the cheap way out: creating a special exemption that would exempt taxpayers and tax preparers from risking infringement should they use any of these "patented" tax strategies. While this bill may be well-intentioned, like the attempt to allow banks to ignore a questionable patent on check scanning, it's the wrong approach. Rather than dealing with the root causes of problems with the patent system, these bills look to paper over the manifestations of those problems. In the long run, such laws (if they become law) would only make the system worse. It's nice that Rep. Rick Boucher (who often is on the right side when it comes to intellectual property issues) recognizes that tax preparation patents are a problem -- but this isn't the way to solve them.

Filed Under: congress, patents, rick boucher, tax planning, tax strategies