Inventions in the United States

The LEAHY-SMITH AMERICA INVENTS ACT (AIA)

In September, 2011, President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, historic patent reform legislation designed to help American entrepreneurs and businesses bring their inventions to market sooner, creating new businesses and new jobs.

The key provisions of the AIA, which went into full effect in 2012, are helping to improve the patent system for innovators in all fields by offering a fast-track option for patent processing; taking important steps to reduce the current patent backlog; and increasing the ability of Americans to protect their intellectual property abroad.
Several provisions of AIA may help address some of the problematic behavior of patent trolls by creating new programs at the Patent and Trademark Office to create alternatives to litigation regarding patent validity, new methods for post-grant review of issued patents, and major steps to increase patent quality through clarifying and tightening standards. Nonetheless, the impact of aggressive litigation tactics by patent trolls and others was not widely known during the seven years the AIA was under negotiation, and as President Obama said, AIA “only went about halfway to where we need to go.”

Patent Trolls (PAEs)

Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) are called patent trolls.

Inventions and the State Laws

Finding the law: Inventions in the U.S. Code

A collection of general and permanent laws relating to inventions, passed by the United States Congress, are organized by subject matter arrangements in the United States Code (U.S.C.; this label examines inventions topics), to make them easy to use (usually, organized by legal areas into Titles, Chapters and Sections). The platform provides introductory material to the U.S. Code, and cross references to case law. View the U.S. Code’s table of contents here.

Resources

Further Reading

• Information about Inventions in the Gale Encyclopedia of American Law.