Book Description

Excerpt from Report of the Patent Committee of the National Research Council, Vol. 20: Presented for the Committee The Patent Office is keeping secret and withholding from publication many inventions made since the beginning of the war and which are useful in war. After the war, it will be imperative that American inventors continuously improve American products and the manufacture of them and make basically new inventions to meet and keep ahead of the strenuous efforts which Germany and other nations will make to attain supremacy by these methods. Your Committee has, therefore, carefully investigated the Patent Office and the patent system, with a view to increasing their effectiveness, and, based on its investigation and the experience of its members, makes the following recommendations: The Committee has concluded to propose a program consisting of but four features, because it believes those features arc of such fundamental importance that their enactment into law would strengthen the entire system and directly and indirectly establish it upon a new and much more advantageous footing before Congress and the public; and because with a single program, presenting comparatively little opportunity for difference of opinion as to the desirability of the changes proposed, there would be an unanimity of opinion in support of it which could not be obtained if the program were more extended. A Single Court of Patent Appeals The first proposal which your Committee recommends is the establishment of a single Court of Patent Appeals that will have jurisdiction of appeals in patent cases from all the United States District Courts throughout the country, in place of the nine independent Circuit Courts of Appeal in which appellate jurisdiction is now vested. Until 1891 the Supreme Court of the United States was the appellate court in patent cases for all the lower courts. At that time the right of appeal to the Supreme Court in patent cases was taken away, and that Court now hears patent cases only upon writs of certiorari, which are never granted unless certain very unusual conditions exist. The existence of nine appellate courts of concurrent jurisdiction in patent cases works serious hardships. While, theoretically, the law is the same in all of these courts, there has been an irresistible tendency to drift apart in the application of the law. It has even happened in a substantial number of cases that two of the appellate courts have taken a different view of one and the same patent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.