With yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee vote, there are now competing, and in some respects significantly different, patent reform proposals under serious consideration in the House and the Senate. Among the most important differences is a new provision in the House bill that effectively limits venue in patent cases brought by non-practicing entities to the location of the defendant or the inventor’s research and development work. The House bill also creates a presumption in favor of fee-shifting, rather than requiring the prevailing party to prove its entitlement to fees as in the Senate bill. Like the Senate bill, the House bill seeks to curb perceived abuse of inter partes review and post-grant review proceedings by hedge funds, but does so by targeting specific practices, in contrast to the Senate bill’s approach of giving the Patent and Trademark Office broad discretion not to institute proceedings. It remains to be seen how these differences will be resolved as the House and Senate continue to debate the competing bills.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 24-8 to send its patent reform bill—an amended version of H.R. 9, the Innovation Act—to the House floor for debate. Prior to the vote, the key provisions of the Innovation Act were heavily debated, with committee members proposing 20 amendments over the course of the day-long markup, many attempting to bring the Innovation Act more closely in line with the Senate bill. The committee ultimately adopted a manager’s amendment offered by Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the lead sponsor of the bill, along with five other amendments. The committee’s approval of the Innovation Act comes just one week after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send its leading patent reform bill, the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship (PATENT) Act, to the full Senate.