Sheppard Presents On Patent Law Reform

Sheppard 2 0611resized.jpg

Dr. Christal Sheppard addressed an audience of judges, patent law professionals and students at the UMKC IP and Technology Transfer Symposium held October 14, 2011 in Kansas City. Her talk "Patent Law Reform: Success, Failures and Missed Opportunities" was well received and generated a thoughtful discourse of the separate roles for the Courts and Congress in Patent Law and Policy-making. She discussed as successes the bipartisan nature and compromise that allowed the most significant patent reform in a century to be passed into law, in a time of partisan struggles but also noted as a success items that did not make it into the final legislation. Dr. Sheppard listed as failures the erosion of the bias against trade secret and the inclusion of special interest provisions, such as the transitional program for covered business method patents the poorly drafted Section 33 of the bill which limited the issuance of patents in certain situations. The central portion of her talk discussed the missed opportunity for Congress to fulfill its Constitutional directive to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by again side stepping the foundational issue of defining patentable subject matter, a role that it has abdicated to the courts over the last 30 years.