Reform patent system to protect small businesses

Small U.S. companies like mine, Loctote Industrial Bag Co., rely on innovation to create jobs and stay ahead of the competition. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses employ nearly half of our nation’s workforce.

The desire to meet a practical need and the opportunity to reap financial benefits provide the fuel for innovation. Like most inventions, Loctote bags came about based on a personal need I had, and an obsessive commitment to the challenge of solving it.

That said, innovation and creativity can be stifled when inventors run up against a cumbersome patenting process, or when large companies steal our ideas and use endless legal resources to fight us in court. That is why it is so important to protect the intellectual property rights of inventors and small businesses.

In discussions with other inventors, we all agree that the time and expense to file a patent nowadays far outweighs the benefits of having it, assuming it ever does get approved. Unanimously, none of us would ever litigate a patent because of the cost, and the unlikeliness of actually prevailing.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center’s 2018 International IP Index, the United States has fallen to 12th place in the category that measures the strength of a nation’s patent system. This is due in large part to several harmful Supreme Court decisions and administrative proceedings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that have weakened our patent system.

Quite simply, our diminishing patent system is killing American innovation, which consequently kills American jobs. As I have witnessed firsthand, our nation’s decline in innovation and loss of jobs to overseas competitors is not simply a result of unfair trade practices, exploitation of cheap labor, and human-rights violations, as we all like to think. Rather, it’s the result of an unfair and unfriendly innovation environment, self-inflicted and perpetuated by our own misguided actions.

Thankfully, a bipartisan (imagine that!) bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that will help protect the rights of local inventors like me. The STRONGER Patents Act of 2017 will strengthen the rights of inventors by enacting balanced reforms to restore the U.S. patent system to being the world’s gold standard. This bill protects small businesses and inventors against deep-pocketed multinational corporations.

Specifically, the STRONGER Patents Act protects American inventors from illegal infringement while cases are pending, and grants permanent relief to protect patent owners from ongoing infringement after a court determines the patent to be valid and infringed.

The bill also ensures fairness in patent-office administrative challenges. These changes are needed to limit repetitive and frivolous challenges against patent owners and to ensure that the proceedings are fair to all parties, including solo inventors and small businesses.

I enjoy inventing and creating new things to solve real-world problems. It’s what drives me, and people like me, to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t want American innovation to be smothered by an adverse patent system that shows preference to the party with the largest legal fund.

That’s why it is so important that Congress pass the STRONGER Patents Act.