Senate disposes of controversial Coburn amendment

The Senate voted 50 to 48 on Thursday afternoon to table a controversial amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that, in effect, would have prohibited the federal government from using funds raised through patent fees for unrelated purposes.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the floor manager for the patent bill, was the chief opponent of Coburn’s amendment, arguing that its addition would likely “kill” patent reform efforts because the House would not accept it.

“I’ve worked for years against fee diversion,” said Leahy, who added that he supports the content of Coburn’s amendment. “But it was already rejected by the House of Representatives and they have made it very clear they will not change.” 

Coburn called fee diversion “immoral” and "close to being criminal," and argued that senators ought not shrink from doing the right thing out of fear of what lawmakers in the House might want.

“Why would we tell the American people we are not going to the right thing… because someone the House doesn't want us to? That we are not going to put these corrections in the House bill?” asked Coburn.

Coburn said that so far more than $900 million had been "stolen" from the U.S. Patent Office through fee diversion and that the money ought to be used to improve the Patent Office and go through a 700,000 backlog of applications.

Prior to that vote the Senate also rejected an amendment 47-51 offered by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pertaining to a lawsuit over patent term extensions, and another amendment offered by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), about a transitional program for covered business method patents 13-85.

The underlying legislation, which is now up for a vote on final passage, would change the U.S. from a first-to-invent to a first-inventor-to-file patent system, a move proponents say would bring the U.S. patent system closer to systems already used by most of the rest of the world.