Political Quotes

“I wanted to address the issue of patent reform--a bill the Senate has already passed by an overwhelming margin. It is my understanding the House of Representatives is expecting to pass a patent reform bill the House wants, and in the process the House wants the Senate to agree very soon thereafter and do it without a formal conference. I want my colleagues to understand why I hope the House-passed bill will contain a provision that was not in our Senate bill but passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee. The House committee report recognized that the ``need to modernize patent laws has found expression in the courts'' but that ``the courts are constrained in their decisions by the text of statutes at issue.'' That is from the House committee report. The House Judiciary Committee amendment that passed unanimously resulted from a recent Federal court case that had as its genesis the difficulty that the FDA--the Food and Drug Administration--and the patent office face when deciding how to calculate Hatch-Waxman deadlines. The Hatch-Waxman law was a compromise between drug patent holders and the generic manufacturers. Under the Waxman-Hatch law, once a patent holder obtains market approval, the patent holder has 60 days to request the patent office to restore the patent term--time lost because of the FDA's long deliberating process eating up valuable patent rights. The citation for the case I am talking about is 731 F. Supp 2nd 470.…”