https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_death_warrant_for_american_ingenuity.html
Last September, scores of patent-holders demonstrated in six cities across the U.S. wearing black t-shirts that said, “Homo sapiens inventoris: Endangered Species.” These men and women of ingenuity were protesting America’s decade of stolen dreams: the years since the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011 and the establishment of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which together have made it easy for big corporations to steal their ideas and profit from them with impunity.
“We’ve had piracy for all the years I’ve been an inventor, but the AIA just put it on steroids, in the context that now you can get PTAB-ed and lose your rights without any due process at all,” said Dan Brown at the Detroit rally. A professor with more than 40 patents, including inventions used in space shuttles, Brown invented the bionic wrench, a one-size-fits-all wrench that obviates the problem of stripped bolt corners. He says Sears stole his idea, down to the marketing pitch, and replaced his product on its shelves with a Chinese rip-off.
Participants at these rallies, organized by U.S. Inventor, a non-profit fighting for inventors’ rights, had similar stories. So do others represented by U.S. Inventor. Among them are Molly Metz, a jump rope champion whose patented idea for a ball-and-eye pivot mechanism for speed ropes was stolen by a rogue competitor; Glenn Sanders, whose patent on Emmy award–winning wireless video recording equipment was invalidated by PTAB; and Gene Luoma, an octogenarian muscular dystrophy patient who lost his patent and millions in royalties on his Zip-It drain cleaner.
These are individuals who came up with brilliant ideas or solutions, worked on them, built prototypes, set up small businesses, and plowed ahead to sell their products. But the new patent system under AIA is throttling them. For them, it is destroying the culture of inventiveness, innovation, and creating original products and solutions that made America great and rocketed it into space.
To understand how that came about, a brief history of American patent law is in order.