House Nearing Completion of Patent Office Overhaul →
Seems like the bill is mostly about how the USPTO is funded, but this part is a significant, fundamental change:
The bill generally updates the process for challenging patents and would change the patent system to one that awards a patent to the first inventor to file a specific claim.
Currently, the first person to invent something has patent priority, whether or not he is the first to file an application.
I’m not a lawyer and have only a surface-level understanding of this, but isn’t this a monumentally bad idea that will only make the U.S. patent system even more dysfunctional, more favorable to trolls and bulk patent filers, and more crippling to innovation by anyone but the largest companies capable of filing patents constantly?