2 REPORT OF THE PATENT COMMITTEE 



which is not more or less the result of American invention. The Patent 

 Office is keeping secret and withholding from publication many inventions 

 made since the beginning of the war and which are useful in war. After 

 the war, it will be imperative that American inventors continuously im- 

 prove American products and the manufacture of them and make 

 basically new inventions to meet and keep ahead of the strenuous efforts 

 which Germany and other nations will make to attain supremacy by 

 these methods. 



Your Committee has, therefore, carefully investigated the Patent 

 Office and the patent system, with a view to increasing their effectiveness, 

 and, based on its investigation and the experience of its members, makes 

 the following recommendations: 



The Committee has concluded to propose a program consisting of but 

 four features, because it believes those features are of such fundamental 

 importance that their enactment into law would strengthen the entire 

 system and directly and indirectly establish it upon a new and much 

 more advantageous footing before Congress and the public; and because 

 with a single program, presenting comparatively little opportunity for 

 difference of opinion as to the desirability of the changes proposed, there 

 would be an unanimity of opinion in support of it which could not be 

 obtained if the program were more extended. 



A SINGLE COURT OF PATENT APPEALS 



The first proposal which your Committee recommends is the estab- 

 lishment of a single Court of Patent Appeals that will have jurisdiction 

 of appeals in patent cases from all the United States District Courts 

 throughout the country, in place of the nine independent Circuit Courts 

 of Appeal in which appellate jurisdiction is now vested. 



Until 1891 the Supreme Court of the United States was the appellate 

 court in patent cases for all the lower courts. At that time the right 

 of appeal to the Supreme Court in patent cases was taken away, and that 

 Court now hears patent cases only upon writs of certiorari, which are 

 never granted unless certain very unusual conditions exist. 



The existence of nine appellate courts of concurrent jurisdiction in 

 patent cases works serious hardships. While, theoretically, the law is 

 the same in all of these courts, there has been an irresistible tendency 

 to drift apart in the application of the law. It has even happened in a 

 substantial number of cases that two of the appellate courts have taken 

 a different view of one and the same patent. It is, of course, very im- 

 portant that the questions which always exist as to the validity and 



