TITLE V—JUDICIARY AND 
OTHER MATTERS 
SEC. 501. SENSE OF CONGRESS ON RETAINING HIGH TECH 
TALENT IN THE UNITED STATES. 
It is the sense of Congress that comprehensive immi-
gration reform should ensure that the United States re-
tains foreign-born high-tech talent educated in the United 
States and remains the leader in innovation and techno-
logical development in an emerging global marketplace. 
Such comprehensive reform should ensure— 
(1) that the United States continues to retain 
foreign nationals who have received master’s or 
higher degrees in the sciences, technology, engineer-
ing or mathematics from United States institutions 
of higher education under either— 
(A) the H–1B visa program; or 
(B) as employment-based immigrants; 
(2) that the United States must take a forward 
looking approach with respect to any limitations on 
the H–1B visa program; and 
(3) that immigration reform should also include 
systematic improvements to the Government’s tech-
nology infrastructure in order to eliminate delays in 
processing immigration proceedings, including em-
ployment-based visa applications.
SEC. 502. STUDY ON BARRIERS TO INNOVATION. 
(a) IN
GENERAL.—The National Academy of 
Sciences shall conduct and complete a study to identify, 
and to review methods to mitigate, new forms of risk for 
businesses beyond conventional operational and financial 
risk that affect the ability to innovate, including studying 
and reviewing— 
(1) incentive and compensation structures that 
could effectively encourage long-term value creation 
and innovation; 
(2) methods of voluntary and supplemental dis-
closure by industry of intellectual capital, innovation 
performance, and indicators of future valuation; 
(3) means by which government could work 
with industry to enhance the legal and regulatory 
framework to encourage the disclosures described in 
paragraph (2); 
(4) practices that may be significant deterrents 
to United States businesses engaging in innovation 
risk-taking compared to foreign competitors, includ-
ing tort litigation, the nature and extent of any re-
sulting defensive management practices, and rec-
ommendations on practices to restore innovation 
risk-taking and to overcome defensive practices; 
(5) means by which industry, trade associa-
tions, and universities could collaborate to support
research on management practices and methodolo-
gies for assessing the value and risks of longer term 
innovation strategies; and 
(6) means to encourage new, open, and collabo-
rative dialogue between industry associations, regu-
latory authorities, management, shareholders, and 
other concerned interests to encourage appropriate 
approaches to innovation risk-taking. 
(b) REPORT REQUIRED.—The National Academy of 
Sciences shall, not later than 1 year after the date of en-
actment of this Act, submit to Congress a report on the 
study conducted under subsection (a). 
(c) AUTHORIZATIONS OF APPROPRIATIONS.—There 
are authorized to be appropriated to the National Acad-
emy of Sciences $1,000,000 for fiscal year 2007 for the 
purpose of carrying out the study required under this sec-
tion. 
SEC. 503. SENSE OF CONGRESS ON PATENT REFORM. 
It is the sense of Congress that— 
(1) to bolster the United States economy and 
strengthen innovators in the United States, the pat-
ent system should be reformed to enhance the qual-
ity of patents, to leverage patent databases as inno-
vation tools, and to create best practices for global 
collaborative standard setting; and
(2) to achieve the objectives described in para-
graph (1), the Federal Government should— 
(A) fully fund the Patent and Trademark 
Office and enable the Office to direct its fees to 
fund process improvements; 
(B) improve compliance with existing pat-
enting requirements and create incentives for 
improved search and disclosure of prior art; 
(C) create new standards for searchability 
of patent applications and new patents; 
(D) establish a fair and balanced post- 
grant patent review procedure for future pat-
ents and patent applications; 
(E) invest in retroactively creating search-
able keywords for a subset of the most highly 
cited historical patents; 
(F) secure reciprocal access to foreign pat-
ent databases; and 
(G) set best practices and processes for 
standards bodies to align incentives for collabo-
rative standard setting, and to encourage broad 
participation. 
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