[Update] A vote on S.23 is expected this evening, March 2, 2011. Before becoming law, the bill would need to also be approved by the House of Representatives.
I want to thank Professor McCrackin and her students for providing a useful analysis that compares the patent-race issues involved with the move to a first-to-file system.
I have long maintained that pressure to move to first-to-file has very little to do with these patent races. Interferences are extremely rare. And, as we all know, if it is difficult to prove prior dates of conception and reduction to practice, it is all-but-impossible to prove diligence at the level required by caselaw. Thus, in the words of Paul Morgan, analyzing the change in terms of the patent race is a "truly academic exercise."
For this reason, in my 2010 article on anticipation I decided to move the nomenclature away from first-to-invent and first-to-file systems and instead talk about whether the patent system is filing-date-focused or invention-date-focused and also to query the type of grace period allowed by the various systems.
What few are talking about with the proposed legislation is that it would increase the scope of prior art available to invalidate a patent – even when no competing patent application is filed.
In particular, the proposed legislation severely restricts the one-year grace period currently available to a patent applicant. Under the new legislation, a prior inventor could only antedate a pre-filing disclosure if that disclosure was (1) derived from the inventor or (2) made public after the inventor publicized her invention. Under the current rules, the one-year grace period operates without regard to the source of the putative prior art.
Even more, under current law, sales and offers-to-sell only constitute prior art if those sales occurred more than one year before the patent application filing date. 35 U.S.C. § 102(b). In those circumstances, no "swearing behind" is necessary against sales activities because they only qualify as prior art if they occurred outside of the grace period. It appears from the language of the bill, that no grace period would be allowed for pre-filing sales activities. Rather, the grace period language in the proposed bill only relates to "disclosures" and on sale activity is typically not seen as a disclosure.
From a practical standpoint, these elements involving the grace period are much more likely to impact patent applicants than any potential interference issue.
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