San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 2011 by Carolyn Lochhead
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/09/MNQ01I6D0G.DTL
UC Berkeley law Professor Robert Merges said concerns among small inventors are wildly overblown. They would be able to file placeholder applications and have a year to hone their inventions, he said.
Pamela Samuelson … said in an e-mail that the United States and the Philippines are the only nations that have first-to-invent systems. “The international norm is that the first inventor to file gets a patent,” Samuelson said. “The economic arguments in favor of the first-to-file system are strong and the ‘little guy’ inventor story that this rule favors big firms is really a myth.”