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Senate Judiciary Committee Releases Witness List for Patent Reform Hearing

    By Donald Zuhn —

Senate Committee Room
During yesterday's press conference announcing the introduction of new patent reform legislation in both the Senate and House, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee would be holding a hearing on patent reform next week.  The hearing, entitled "Patent Reform in the 111th Congress:  Legislation and Recent Court Decisions" will take place on March 10th at 10:00 AM (Eastern).

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a witness list for the hearing.  Among the witnesses scheduled to appear before the Committee are:

• Steven Appleton, Chairman and CEO of Micron Technology, Inc.;
• Philip Johnson, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for Johnson & Johnson;
• David Kappos, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel of Intellectual Property Law and Strategy for International Business Machines Corporation;
• Taraneh Maghame, Vice President of Tessera, Inc.;
• Herbert Wamsley, Executive Director for the Intellectual Property Owners Association; and
• Mark Lemley, the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

For biotech and pharma patent applicants and practitioners, the list seems a little imbalanced as only one of the witnesses (Philip Johnson of Johnson & Johnson) has any connection with the life sciences industry.

A live webcast of the hearing will be broadcast on the Committee's website.

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One response to “Senate Judiciary Committee Releases Witness List for Patent Reform Hearing”

  1. anonymousAgent Avatar
    anonymousAgent

    Why is there no independent inventor?
    Where are the VCs?
    Where are the startups?
    It seems to be strongly biased towards rich, well-heeled corporations.
    And if they must have a professor, Prof. Kayton would be the obvious choice, rather than Prof. Lemley.

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