Rich Baker Announces Congressional Bid

Richard Baker is 3Com’s innovative intellectual property director. He is also running for Congress to represent the 6th District of Massachusetts as a Republican. (North of Boston). For many years, Baker has been a proponent of strong patent rights and monetization of those rights:

“We need strong patent laws in the United States to protect our ideas, to protect our inventors, to protect our jobs, from infringers. For the past several years, many in Congress have been working hard to water down our patent laws, trying to make it easier for copiers to steal ideas. As an Intellectual Property Executive, I know the impact of these changes on the Massachusetts economy, and I will fight efforts to weaken our protection in the global economy.”

Baker is the republican candidate and will be up against incumbent Democrat John Tierney in the fall.

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10 thoughts on “Rich Baker Announces Congressional Bid

  1. 10

    It sure looks like he is for the trolls. Also, compare the websites and there positions.
    http://www.JohnTierney.com and http://www.richbaker08.com

    John Tierney is very professional and has a good grasp of the issues most of the voters care about, like veteran’s rights. Bush and company have been trying to hide the cost of the Iraq war by putting the $10B – $12B a month on our children’s credit cards instead of paying for their decisions; over extending our troops instead of a start up the draft; and not allocating funding to physically and psychologically injured veterans. That is because if we had to actually paid for these decisions, then more people might push harder for the spending and the war to end.

    link to vote-ma.org

    Congressman Tierney is a strong supporter of protecting and expanding military retiree benefits for our veterans. He is a co-sponsor of H.R. 515, legislation that seeks to provide health care coverage to all military retirees by making money available to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to meet the needs of the new veterans of our most recent wars. He is also an original co-sponsor of H.R. 2131, the New GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century, which seeks to improve benefits for members of the Armed Forces, veterans, and their dependents and survivors. In addition, he has consistently worked with like-minded colleagues in Congress to substantially increase the number and quality of health insurance options for veterans. In October 2000, Public Law 106-398 established permanent TRICARE eligibility for Medicare-eligible military retirees and their families, beginning October 1, 2002. As the program is structured, beneficiaries will pay no co-payments or deductibles under this program. The coverage will be available to any service member who served at least 20 years on active duty. Congressman Tierney will continue to closely monitor the state of the TRICARE program to ensure that military retirees are appropriately protected in the years to come.

    Mr. Baker never mentions the war and seems to focusing on Troll rights. The question you have to ask yourself is, do the people in the 6th district care about these patent issues, probably a very small percentage, so is Mr. Baker representing the people of the 6th district or Mr. Baker’s view?

  2. 9

    He is a Republican, the party of Outsourcing and H1-B visas. Hard to take a technolgy republican serious when his party is committed to sending our Computer Technology industry to India, and/or replacing our people with H1-B slave labor. Why have patent reform or a patent office when the US doesnt make anything anymore? Soon we wont invent anything either.

  3. 8

    From June, 2006

    link to redherring.com

    Jon Dudas leads the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, overseeing a budget of $1.3 billion, 7,000 employees, and a half-million patent applications per year. A fierce free market advocate, he’s looking to improve the plodding American patent system by increasing involvement from private parties. He’s also adding 1,000 new examiners per year.

    In a recent chat with Red Herring, Mr. Dudas said he supports two of the less radical patent law reforms currently pending in Congress: opportunities to challenge patents after they are published, as well as after they are issued. He also defended so-called patent trolls, saying that having outfits that sell intellectual property rather than manufacturing products “is actually a very efficient way to run things.”

    Prior to being appointed to his position in 2004, Mr. Dudas, 37, practiced law in Chicago and advised Congress on intellectual property issues, playing roles in inventor protection and anti-counterfeiting legislation, as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. His current official title is under secretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

    Q: What are you doing to make getting a patent more efficient? A: We’re trying to have a more robust system for applicants, giving us more information when they apply. We also want to make sure third parties have opportunities to give information and challenge patents.

    Q: Does that mean you have to expand your budget? A: We don’t have to expand our budget. We received a fee increase a few years ago that’s gone largely to quality initiatives and hiring. But hiring a thousand examiners a year is not a great long-term strategy. That’s why we want to bring more involvement from the private sector. They have a statutory responsibility; we just have to give them more opportunities.

    Q: What’s your take on hot-button intellectual property issues for the tech industry, such as injunctions? A: We’ve heard from the tech community and others that the law discourages them from learning what patents are out there. We think that’s the wrong way to look at it; we want to make sure people do thorough searches to find out what’s out there. Quite honestly, I think a lot of concerns from the tech community are really about the litigation system and less so the patent system. It costs something between $3 [million] and $5 million to litigate in court, so people are hesitant to do that.

    Q: The patent and litigation systems don’t seem very well aligned as seen in the case of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, which paid a hefty settlement to patent-holder NTP to avoid a judge issuing an injunction on the wildly popular wireless email device. Meanwhile, your office was busy rejecting the patents at stake. A:In both the eBay and the NTP-RIM case, the reexamination request was put in to the Patent and Trademark Office after the court had already found there was willful infringement, and had issued an injunction and millions of dollars in damages. If you believe there’s a patent that issued that shouldn’t have, come to the office quickly, and ask for reexamination. We’ll get that done within two years.

    Q: Is it at all unsettling for you to go back and look at those patents and see that they maybe shouldn’t have ever issued?A: It’s not unsettling for the following reason: we receive 425,000 applications a year, and we get about 500 requests for reexamination. I don’t think any system is perfect.

    Q: IP is increasingly seen as something that can be translated into dollars; where do you think that trajectory is going?

    A: I’m a pure capitalist, I believe in markets. I think treating intellectual property and patents, and trademarks and copyrights, as property will bring more efficiency and more innovation. There are transactions to be made out there; there are great ideas that people have patented. They’re not necessarily the best people to manufacture or develop that idea, but they can sell that idea to someone else.

  4. 7

    Chicago – The talk of prominent Republican Jon Dudas challenging Rep. Todd Tiahrt, D-Chicago, in the upcoming election seems to be more than just talk. Asked Thursday by The Eagle editorial board when he might declare his candidacy for Congress, the former counsel to the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and former Staff Director and Deputy General Counsel for the House Committee on the Judiciary exclaimed “Wow!” and then said, “Stay tuned.” At the moment, he has another item on his agenda — he’s the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

    j/k

  5. 4

    “I’m worried that this guy would be with the trolls.”

    Why? And what does it mean to be “with the trolls”?

  6. 2

    I wonder how much $$$ he is getting from RIM, HP, M$, Oracle, Time-Warner, IBM and Countrywide Financial ????

  7. 1

    Good luck to him. However, his prospects don’t look good since John Tierney has won his last three elections 70% to 30%.

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