Patent reform 2011 creates uncertainty and is bad for business

David Boundy comments on how the "patent reform" bill would create uncertainty:

The bill also destroys commercial certainty and corrupts the incentives in the system:

• Various statutory requirements that an applicant act “without deceptive intention” are repealed—in the future, applicants will have incentive to act with deceptive intent.
• Key terms of art are redefined—you’ve spent a career learning the meaning of “on sale” and “public use,” but the legislative history fundamentally redefines these terms. It will take decades for courts to establish new precedent to provide any meaningful commercial certainty.
• The Metallizing Engineering “secret commercial use” bar is repealed—a company will be able to use an invention as a trade secret, and then spring a patent on the public years later. That favors market incumbents, but makes innovation harder for everyone else.
• The “best mode” requirement is reduced to a sham: a patentee will be permitted to disclose only a fictitious embodiment, while holding the best as a trade secret.
• The bill gives companies the right to patent and repatent inventions for years, to keep them locked up, neither using them nor permitting them to be used, for far longer than 20 years.
• Several aspects of the “first-inventor-to-file” provision—the ones that give patents to second inventors, and to companies that kept inventions in secret for years before filing patent applications—violate constitutional limits on Congress’ authority—years more litigation and commercial uncertainty.
• The Act allows Wall Street banks to attack “business method” patents that they are infringing. This doesn’t extend to any other industry, only business methods—another Wall Street giveaway.