Patents Protect American Manufacturers

Don’t change a system that doesn’t need changing.

If something isn’t broken, it doesn’t make sense to try to fix it. And yet some are eager to start tinkering with our nation’s patent system, even though the system is working very well.

Protecting patents are a core value of Americans and consistent with the idea that investors have a property right to their inventions. According to Adam Mossoff who wrote back in 2013 at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) that “in the early American republic, courts secured patents as fundamental property rights.”

Judges treated patents the same as real estate and our Founders granted special protections for inventions. Now comes some politicians who are claiming to streamline and improve the patent process, yet they are really empowering bad actors who are infringing on other’s intellectual property rights to make more cash.

The most recent attempt at “reform” is through the “STRONGER Patent Act,” sponsored by Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. The bill pretends to reform the patent system. What it would really do, though, is gut the Patent Office’s Inter Partes Review, a rare but important process that helps protect against patent fraud.

You may not have heard much about this, because patents, while important, tend to be…