“There will be heightened uncertainty for the rest of the decade,” says Paul Michel, a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in evaluating the provisions of the new legislation. “The bill makes fundamental changes, and many sections are poorly written and ambiguous.”
One such fundamental change is the shift to a “first-to-file” system, in which a patent is granted to the first person to apply, from a “first-to-invent” system, in which it is granted to the first person to conceive of an invention and reduce it to practice.
