Following Senate passage of patent reform legislation, the House is now moving forward quickly. Draft legislation circulated last week is expected to be introduced today, in advance of the Judiciary Subcmte. hearing scheduled for Wednesday. And Committee leadership has indicated a desire for the Committee to approve legislation before the Easter recess. While SIIA will continue to work with House leaders to fine-tune some of the language, SIIA is supportive of many key provisions in the draft bill, including those that would end patent fee diversion, convert the U.S. system to “first-inventor-to-file” with prior user rights and provide for third party prior art submission.
On the Privacy front, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has yet to formally introduce his much-anticipated privacy legislation, but he continues to tweak the draft. The most recent version reportedly adds a “privacy by design” section and modifies the exemption for personally identifiable information that’s publicly available and a more detailed definition of “sensitive personally identifiable information,” a term that now covers data that, if leaked, would cause “a significant risk of economic, physical or emotional” harm.
Cybersecurity continues to draw a lot of attention on in Washington. The Senate Commerce Committee postponed a hearing scheduled for today due to unrelated conflicts. However, legislators in the House and Senate, as well as the White House, continue to discuss key elements and seek common ground. More on this next week.
In other IP news, SIIA held a webcast for members last Friday on ICANN’s plans to accept applications for possibly hundreds of new generic top level domains (gTLDs). New gTLDs may provide additional branding and strategic opportunities for some companies, but also may exponentially increase cybersquatting, present new trademark and copyright infringement problems for IP owners, and dramatically increase enforcement costs. ICANN is in the process of finalizing new IP rights protection mechanisms and gTLD objection procedures, following comments by SIIA and many others. SIIA will continue to follow these developments closely and participate in the ICANN policy development processes.