A Patent System for the 21st Century (2004).Levin, Richard C. and Mark B. Myers. (2004). A Patent System for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press In April 2004 a STEP committee chaired by Yale President Richard Levin and former Xerox CTO Mark Myers issued a final report of a broad study of how well the U.S. patent system is fulfilling its purpose of encouraging research, innovation, and the dissemination of knowledge and how it is adapting to rapid technological and economic changes. It found that while the system has shown admirable flexibility in accommodating new technologies, there is reason to be concerned about the quality of issued patents, the resources available to the US Patent and Trademark Office to keep up with the pace of technological change and volume of applications, features of U.S. law that inhibit the dissemination of information contained in patents and that raise the cost and uncertainty of litigation over patent validity and infringement, access to patented research technologies for basic non-commercial research, and redundancies and inconsistencies among national patent systems that raise the cost of global intellectual property protection.Richard C. and Mark B. Myers. (2004). A Patent System for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press With dedicated dissemination funds provided by the NRC, a private foundation, and several companies and law firms, a very extensive outreach effort, involving public meetings across the country, was undertaken. The committee co-chairs were lead-off witnesses in Senate and House patent reform hearings in the spring of 2005 and again in 2007. Five of the report’s seven recommendations are core provisions of legislation introduced by the committee chairs in the 109th Congress and expected to be re-introduced in the 110th.
