Patent Reform Bill Would Raise the Stakes for Small Business IP Practices
The U.S. patent system has long been an outlier in its approach to protecting intellectual property (IP) rights. While every other industrialized country awards IP protection to the first party to apply for a patent, the U.S. system bases its IP decisions on the first inventor of a particular technology. As foreign markets have become more important to high-tech companies seeking to go global from day one, this approach has complicated the country's ability to enter into international agreements that would protect the IP rights of U.S.