Northwest Austin

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-District 21, said Sept. 28 that he believed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had planned to open its third satellite office in Austin, but because of budgetary reasons, those plans—as well as plans for the other two offices—had been put on hold.

“We have been set back a little bit, but I think over time it has got to be inevitable,” Smith said at a round table hosted by IBM. “We are going to stay after it, but it may be a little while.”

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, co-sponsored by Smith and which President Obama signed into law Sept. 16, authorizes the patent office to establish three or more satellite offices in the U.S. Detroit had been picked as the first location; Silicon Valley in California was to be the second, Smith said.

On Wednesday, Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the committee, gathered at the IBM Innovation Center with representatives from IBM, National Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices and Eureka Software to discuss the act’s impact on innovation and job creation.

“The whole idea of the bill, and this is a slight oversimplification, is to basically make sure good patents are awarded more quickly,” Smith said.

According to the speakers, the average patent takes about three years to be approved.

A long time coming

Prior to passage of the bill, the country’s patent law had not been updated or reformed in nearly 60 years. In addition to allowing for satellite offices, the act gets rid of some of the system’s most archaic provisions, allocates funds to modernize the Patent and Trademark Office, puts in place mechanisms to address low-quality patents in a cost-effective manner and gets the United States into “lockstep” with the rest of the world, the speakers said.

“The net effect … whether you are a small company or a big company, medium, high-tech, low-tech, the efficiency gains will be good for everyone who needs to and benefits from the process of invention,” said Ray Almgren, vice president of marketing for core platforms at National Instruments, located on Burnet Road across the street from IBM. “That’s a good thing, particularly in this community because [innovation] is what really fuels the lives we have around here and our ability to create jobs.”