Obama takes action to curb frivolous patent lawsuits
Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama took steps on Tuesday aimed at curbing what the White House called frivolous lawsuits over patent infringement, directing his administration to craft new regulations and urging Congress to pass new laws.
The president's package of proposed legislation and rule-making takes aim at suits brought by companies - disparagingly called "patent trolls" - that do not make or sell anything but merely license patents and sue others for infringement.
Such lawsuits have ballooned in recent years, creating expense and aggravation for businesses, particularly in the technology sector.
Cisco Systems Inc, Apple Inc, Google Inc and other big technology companies have been pushing for legislation that would reduce the number of times each year that they are sued for infringement by "patent trolls."
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-steps-rein-patent-lawsuits-white-house-124154119.html
Good. These scum make ambulance chasers look like saints.
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Until relatively recently, the patent office didn't look beyond its own files for anything involving software. Most people in that field hadn't bothered to file patent applications so the patent office didn't find anything and gave the patent trolls the patents they had applied for, and the cost of doing the patent office's job retroactively (against a presumption of validity) is a very costly and uphill battle. Rather than the patent office refusing to issue a bogus patent, the company sued - years after the fact - has to find enough evidence that it was not (at the time) a real invention. That isn't always easy to do - I've recently been fighting a patent which claimed to have invented object oriented programming. Around 1993.
Unfortunately (and I haven't looked at this particular proposal to see if it is the same), one that is floating around will grab a lot of real developers as patent trolls. One of the proposals labeled anyone beyond the first assignment a troll. The thinking was that the inventor assigned it to hsi company, then any later assignment was to a troll - but it doesn't match how businesses work. Often smaller companies will be bought out, or merge together. That assignment as part of an ongoing real business would treat the new business as a troll - even though there was a real inventor (or inventors) working for a real business, which was absorbed into/merged with another real business.
ETA: It looks like the same (or very similar) language - it is the shell company language. It is very good to go after trolls - but many real businesses change, or are rearranged inside their own company, and the legislation I have seen would brand these real companies as trolls - and if they got a jury which did not understand the technology those real companies (and - in some instances creates a sympathetic David and Goliath story) could wind up paying for the multi-million dollar litigation because they asserted their own patents against a troll who sued them.
And nope. No direct experience at all with these vile critters...
