The Commission’s report comes after a series of hearings held between December 2008 and May 2009, titled “The Evolving IP Marketplace”.
The FTC has recommended that significant changes be made in two key areas of the patent system: notice and remedies.
“[The report] observes that some strategies by patent holders risk distorting competition and deterring innovation,” said the Commission in a release.
It continued: “This is especially true for activity driven by poor patent notice, and by remedies that do not align the compensation received by patent holders for infringement with the economic value of their patented inventions.”
Poorly delineated claims, an inability to predict which claims will issue from pending patents or to identify unpublished patents and the difficulty of searching and reviewing all relevant published patents were the key challenges identified.
These problems mainly affect the IT sector, where claim language and vocabulary can be imprecise, and...