Patent reform: just found on pharma's radar???

Patent Docs has a Dec. 20 post titled --Enjoined New Rules and Patent Reform Finally Appearing on Biotech Industry's Radar-- which included the text:

"...the patent reform bills passed by the House and before the Senate, are finally starting to draw wider attention from those in the biotech and pharma community."

Recall that Robert A. Armitage of Lilly wrote a piece on patent reform in 5 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 267 and has otherwise been appearing in various public fora. See for example:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/05/nas-patent-system-for-21st-century-make.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/09/economic-implications-of-patent-reform.html

The Patent Docs post also notes: The article [in Nature Biotechnolgy] also poses a question that has likely been on the tongues of all biotech and pharma prosecutors since the new rules were published on August 21, 2007: what took the industry so long to realize that the new rules would create serious problems? Outside of crediting the information technology industry's lobbying efforts, however, the article does not offer any new insights into the biotech and pharma industry's reluctance - until GSK entered the fray in October - to mount a strong attack on the new rules or, thus far, the patent reform bills passed by the House and before the Senate.

IPBiz notes that the strong traction of HR 1908 is not surprising because Howard Berman is not much associated with the pharma industry AND has publicly discussed a pharma/Republican alignment.

It's true that the IT industry does have a forceful lobbying effort AND that pharma is more tightly correlated with the out-of-power Republicans.