"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'.......................READ MORE
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