Patent Reform Bill Signed into Law

Roy Zimmermann (roy.zimmermann@medtronic.com)
Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:54:48 -0600

Monday afternoon, President Clinton signed into law the last omnibus
spending bill passed by Congress just prior to their recent adjurnment.
That bill contained a number of miscellaneous provisions, including
Senate 3194 Conference Report, the American Inventors Protection Act.
The Intellectual Property Organization (IPO) Daily News contained a
press release about this bill's passing by Congress in the late hours
prior to adjurnment. That news release was dated 11/22/99. The IPO
website, www.ipo.org
has both the fulltext of the bill, as well as a one-page summary of it.
Quoting from the IPO press release:

"The number of the final bill is S. 3194, conference report. The text
of the patent provisions is unchanged from the version on the first page
of the IPO web site (ipo.org) ("Current Version of American Inventors
Protection Act of 1999") (Title IV of conference report on H.R. 1554).
"

I tried tracking down the text of the bill, now law, on several of the
usual sites prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, with no success.
Thomas, Law Crawler, Findlaw, etc., didn't contain the final stage of
the bill, nor could I readily get the full Omnibus Spending Bill
including the various unrelated appended items, which included Patent
Reform. Perhaps by Tuesday, 11/30, one of the bill tracking services
will have the prodigiously long omnibus spending law available online,
including S 3194 Conference Report.

Roy Zimmermann
Patent Information Specialist
612-514-3304
roy.zimmermann@medtronic.com
rzimmerma@aol.com