HTIA spokesperson John Thorne has a new op-ed in The Hill explains how Inter Partes Review (IPR) protects inventors and innovation:
"The IPR was established in the 2011 bipartisan America Invents Act to restore integrity to what had become a too-often-broken patent system. The Act’s goal was to improve patent quality. It established an inexpensive, easy-to-access route for challenging patents that should never have been granted. The cost and slowness of always going to court had made appeal of bad patents too unreliable. The IPR was to fix that. Today, six years later, it is clear that it has worked. Consider these facts. Almost 70 percent of this year’s challenged patents are in “high tech,” that is software, hardware and networking technologies. High tech is widely acknowledged to suffer from patent quality problems."
Read the entire piece here.