Roy Blunt: “a significant change contained in H.R. 1249 from S. 23, the version of the bill debated and overwhelmingly passed by the…”

“a significant change contained in H.R. 1249 from S. 23, the version of the bill debated and overwhelmingly passed by the Senate earlier this year, is the inclusion of the defense of prior commercial use against infringement of a later granted patent. Specifically, section 5 of H.R. 1249 creates a prior user right for processes, or machines, or compositions of matter used in a manufacturing or other commercial process, that would otherwise infringe a claimed invention if: (1) the person commercially used the subject matter in the United States, either in connection with an internal commercial use or an actual arm's length sale or other arm's length commercial transfer of a useful end result of such commercial use; and (2) the commercial use occurred at least one year before the earlier of either the effective filing date of the claimed invention or the date on which the claimed invention was disclosed to the public in a manner that qualified as an exception from prior art. As the distinguished chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary knows, such prior user rights, if properly crafted and understood, can be of great benefit to keeping high paying jobs in this country by giving U.S. companies a realistic option of keeping internally used technologies as trade secrets.”