The House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a markup hearing on the Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act (PTFMA – H.R. 2791) today. The bill has been referred to the whole Committee on the Judiciary for consideration.
I’m working to determine if any amendments were offered in the markup.
Remember, PTFMA was introduced on the same day as the Patent Act of 2005 and includes the controversial anti-fee diversion provisions that were excised from last year’s major PTO bill, H.R. 1561, on the eve of its passage by way of absorption into the omnibus appropriations bill.
Currently, two completely different approaches to ending fee diversion are sitting in Congress. PTFMA sets up a refund system to avoid fee diversion. In contrast, the COMPETE Act (S. 1020), which sits idle in the Senate, avoids fee diversion using a fee reduction system. With today’s markup and referral to the full Committee, PTFMA enjoys an early lead, likely because H.R. 1561 enjoyed such broad support in the last Congress.
You can download both PTFMA and the COMPETE Act in the PTP Patent Reform Library.
