I'll be calling Schumer's office this morning.... clo
In a Bill, Wall Street Shows Its Clout
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Wall Street often tries to play down its influence in Washington. As Congress pushed through financial regulations that seemed to get watered down last year, Wall Street’s chief executives tried to suggest, somewhat surprisingly, that their highly paid lobbyists did not have much sway.
If there is still any question about how much power Wall Street actually has in Washington, here is some fresh evidence worth examining.
In a piece of legislation recently passed by the House and the Senate to revamp patent law, a tiny provision was inserted at the last minute called Section 18.
The provision, which my colleague Edward Wyatt detailed in an article ahead of the House’s vote on the bill last month, has only one purpose: to allow the banking industry to skirt paying for certain important patents involving “business methods.”
The provision even allows “retroactive reviews of approved business method patents, allowing the financial services industry to challenge patents that have already been found valid both at the U.S. Patent and Trade Office and in Federal Court,” according to Representative Aaron Schock, an Illinois Republican who tried to strike the provision.
The legislation was initially introduced by Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, with an even narrower view: to protect the interests of his big bank constituents in a dispute with DataTreasury Corporation of Plano, Tex., a company that owns dozens of patents for processing digital copies of checks.
Wall Street fought for the bill because it says it has been held hostage by holders of “business method” patents that should never have been granted by the patent office in the first place. Banks like JPMorgan Chase have been fighting DataTreasury over its patents for years.
The language in the bill is expansive. It covers patents for “a financial product or service” as well as “corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service.”
But since the bill and Section 18 were passed and word has spread about it, dozens of other companies are starting to worry that the breadth of the provision may affect them too. And they are fighting back, hoping that the Senate — which still has to reconcile the House’s bill with its own — tosses the provision out.
“It would be a tragedy if the greed of the big banks and their willing accomplices in Congress use this important legislation to trample the rights of legitimate patent holders and in the process weaken the integrity of our patent system,” Tom Giovanetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative research group, said in a statement.
for complete article:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/in-a-bill-wall-street-shows-clout/?ref=business
DO SOMETHING!
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