8 ms·

Finally, A Bill To End Patent Trolling

448 points by drob 13y ago

batbomb 13y ago
> It isn't just HappyTroll LLC or whatever shell company was set up that week that's going to be on the hook for fees. The fees can be applied to any "interested party" in the case. That's good, but the pessimist in me thinks IV could probably find a way around this too, but maybe not. Modifying the law to somehow identify patent troll originators (IV) and barring them from disbursing patents to NPEs would seem like some added protection.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  NPEs per se aren't a problem. Discriminating against them is unjust.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    Unless a company is in the business of producing things its patents cover, it isn't utilizing the patent system as intended. I fail to see how barring a Non Practicing Entity from litigating patents it isn't actually using in a real, product making capacity is unjust. It seems perfectly reasonable to me, in fact.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - cperciva 13y ago
      Part of the purpose of the patent system is to allow individual inventors and small companies to develop technology even if they won't have the resources to produce and sell it. The ideal situation is that these NPEs go out to the large companies in an industry and say "hey, we've got this invention you might be interested in...". If NPEs are barred from litigating patents, there's nothing to stop those large companies from saying "great, we're going to use this... but not pay you anything, because there's nothing you can do about it".
      - whopa 13y ago
        What if the law was that NPEs are barred from litigating patents, unless the NPE was the original inventor. Wouldn't that solve this?
        L_Rahman 13y ago
        The problem in this case there are many instances where the original inventor is not interested in taking on the risk of sales based licensing and so sells the patent for a lump sum to a third party.
        cperciva 13y ago
        That would solve some problems but create others. If it's "original inventor" rather than "original inventor and heirs" you've just created an incentive to assassinate inventors (and a disincentive to invent if you're getting old). Even if it's "original inventor and heirs", you've created a liquidity process -- if you're a chemist with lung cancer, it would be great if you could sell your novel synthesis in order to pay for your cancer treatments rather than needing to start selling drugs yourself. And then there's the problem of defining what a "practicing" entity is, of course. Someone who has at least one customer? Someone who has used the invention themselves? Someone who was planning on building a product, but didn't get into YC and ended up working at Microsoft instead while he tries to license his invention to raise money to pay for his next startup idea?
        whopa 13y ago
        "original inventor and heirs" seems reasonable. I don't follow the chemist example. The patent is still valuable to companies who do want to productize it, or even companies that don't. Companies can still buy and hold patents without doing anything with them, it's just that they are barred from litigating them. They can still resell the patent to someone else, potentially for a profit. A "practicing" entity has either brought a product to market, or uses the invention themselves in the process of building a product on the market. Someone who is planning on building a product but has no funds doesn't get to litigate unless they are the original inventor. Your last example seems to imply that they are the original inventor.
    - qq66 13y ago
      Unequal treatment of NPEs acts against specialization of skills/division of labor. Invention, Manufacturing, and Litigation are three entirely different skills. If an inventor has to start some token manufacturing operations to monetize his patent, that manufacturing will be subscale and inefficient. If the manufacturer has to litigate and cannot sell the patent to litigation specialist firms, they will be distracting themselves from their core business. The ability to sell an asset is an important one for an efficient economy.
      - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
        Your first paragraph consists effectively of assertions without any sort of empirical support, and the second is at best an inappropriate generalization. The ability to sell assets, in general, may be important for an efficient economy, but not necessarily in the case of specific assets, in this case patents, if you care to call them 'assets'. Why should patents be assignable or transferable anyway? The assignment or transfer of a patent necessarily implies the original holder isn't interested in the state-conferred monopoly that a patent is, and therefore he's not interested in having a monopoly on the invention the patent covers. To my mind, the assignment of a patent should immediately expire and/or invalidate it.
        stormbrew 13y ago
        > The assignment or transfer of a patent necessarily implies the original holder isn't interested in the state-conferred monopoly that a patent is, and therefore he's not interested in having a monopoly on the invention the patent covers. It means no such thing. The monopoly has value whether they go through with production themselves or sell it. Selling it just realizes the value in the short term rather than the long.
        Iftheshoefits 13y ago
        The monopoly no longer has value to the original holder once he sells it. He has realized the entire value of the monopoly for a short term profit. This isn't incompatible with the notion that, effective immediately upon such realization of value, the patent should expire. You may disagree that it should expire at that point; in which case we'll have to agree to disagree.
  - r00fus 13y ago
    Can you explain? On the face of it, an entity without any skin in the game (i.e., can't be sued, it'll just fold and re-emerge as another company) sounds like a complete abuse of the system.
    - elliotanderson 13y ago
      It's because you can have "good" NPE's. Take ARM Holdings for example, they do not manufacture their own chips but rather licenses their designs to other semiconductor manufacturers.
      - gngeal 13y ago
        How exactly are ARM Holdings "an NPE"? They're definitely practicing - they're using their patents in their designs. They also attempt to shoot down any independent implementation of the ISA, for that matter.
        Daniel_Newby 13y ago
        ARM does not reduce its inventions to practice. It is not the hardware description language files that are subject to patents but the chips that embody those files. Another valuable example of this is a patent pool consortium, a corporation that exists to bring all patents in a field together for easy licensing.
        gngeal 13y ago
        "ARM does not reduce its inventions to practice." "Reduce inventions to practice?" First, I don't think that my country has any such legalese in our patent law. Second, what does that make NVIDIA? Or ATI? They don't make their own chips either. Third, I believe that what is protected by most of these patents are neither HDL files nor the chips but rather specific implementation techniques for parts of the HDL implementation of the ISA. If the chips were patented, it would be worthless because you could do an independent design.
tzs 13y ago
Interesting legal fact: although the Constitution bars ex post facto laws, that only applies to criminal law. A retroactive tax is legal. One of the reasons trolls have been successful is that the patent office is understaffed, and of the staff it does have, not enough are experts in software related matters. This means things get through that might not have if the PTO had more and better trained examiners. If reforming to eliminate patent trolls, how about tossing in a nice big retroactive tax on patent trolls to help fund improvements in patent examining?
- drob 13y ago
  That's fascinating if true, since the power to tax is the power to destroy. I don't see a clean division around a domain on which a retroactive tax is justified. I had a hard time coming up with a good citation for this. Retroactive taxes seem to be legally controversial whenever introduced, and they're usually retroactive only to the beginning of the year introduced. Could you point me towards a better link?
  - drivingmissm 13y ago
    Yeah I've never heard of that, even retroactive tax in a given year is new and controversial. I'd have to think that a massive retroactive tax would be considered an unconstitutional takings.
- dsrguru 13y ago
  I don't think it's possible to have a retroactive tax on instances of patent trolling, as opposed to patents in general. In order for this to be a tax and not a fine, it seems like it would need to be a tax on the patent application, not on bringing and losing a patent lawsuit. And in order to determine at the point of application whether or not a patent will be used for trolling (which we might define as whether the patent will be used in a lawsuit by an entity that holds the patent but does not itself employ the patent's "invention"), the USPTO would need to be able to read the future.
- chii 13y ago
  >One of the reasons trolls have been successful is that the patent office is understaffed this can be combated by making patent examination a peer review process, in a similar vein to scientific papers.
rayiner 13y ago
The pleading requirement is very important. On of the basic tools courts use to filter out frivolous litigation is to quickly dispose of suits that are implausible on their face. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Atlantic_Corp._v._Twombly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Atlantic_Corp._v._Twombly. Until this bill, the pleadings in patent cases were often ridiculously vague. Like filing a lawsuit against Best Buy saying: "Best Buy was negligent" without making any more specific allegations that could be used to evaluate the complaint on its face. As an aside, there are a lot of parallels between the litigation system under the federal rules and computer systems. In patent litigation, you have a phase that is extremely slow and expensive (claim construction). How can you minimize the average cost? One way is to try and filter out as many easy cases early in the pipeline so you hit the slow path as little as possible.
ihsw 13y ago
One has to wonder how this will affect the TPP, and other greater patent wars across the world.
TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
I know healthcare is really important, but I think this bill is also up there when it comes to the long term financial viability of our nation. Intellectual Ventures and all these other no-talent, pirate scum need to go down. If not, my children and your children will be working for bean soup while some cocksucker in a suit extracts rents for "intellectual" property rights based on some goddamn scrap of paper with no connection to reality. Gonna call my senator and congress woman tomorrow. And then I'm going to tell everyone I know to do the same. Intellectual Ventures and these other pantywaste dirtbags are going to be lobbying hard against this bill, so the only thing we can do (unless you have some millions of dollars to spare on lobbying) is to call people and spread the word. That worked for SOPA, so maybe it can work now too. Go, go, go!
- iwwr 13y ago
  Intellectual Ventures is now the bitter pill tech giants have to swallow to maintain their intellectual monopolies. With legislation that makes trolling impossible, but still maintains the legal privileges, large companies will have their cake and eat it too. It would mean there's nothing stopping the likes of Oracle or Microsoft from lobbying for harsher penalties, looser rules and longer terms for patent law in general. The cure for this problem would be a refutation of patents wholesale, or at the very least a repeal of software and algorithmic patents. Patent trolling isn't a problem that's distinct from legal patent enforcement, it just means some "little guys" can steal some of the intellectual free lunch the large companies have been having.
  - AlisdairO 13y ago
    Agreed. Patent trolling isn't the problem - it's a symptom of the wider issue that far too many obvious patents are granted. The reason NPEs are perceived as a problem is because they break mutually assured destruction. If the patent system were working as intended, we wouldn't need MAD, because it would be possible to write a nontrivial computer program that didn't infringe on someone's patent. I have no real problem with the concept of an NPE, if their patents are genuinely worthwhile.
freakyterrorist 13y ago
Good start but it would be great to see something targeting trolls which threaten small companies and individuals, maybe something forcing them to do a class action against all companies that use Apple IAP frameworks rather than allowing them to target everyone one on one.
dlitz 13y ago
This basically shoots the messenger. NPEs just expose a greater problem with the patent system, which people like rms and others have warning about for years. What we need is actual reform of the patent system, not just sweeping the problem under the rug by singling out "trolls".
swatkat7 13y ago
YES!! I don't think ideas need to be protected if you can back it with great execution. Ideas aren't unique, can never be. As René Girard said, all desires (and hence ideas) are mimetic! So, I don't buy into the philosophy that ideas need to be guarded. It curtails innovation. A couple of years ago when I was building a product, our board convinced us to apply for a patent. After a provisional application and following it up with a proper submission, we finally had an offer that granted us the patent. Never pursued it. I know, it makes sense to protect your ideas; but we had Whatsapp, Pinger and other apps kicking ass in the space.
curiousquestion 13y ago
I like the idea that NPE can only make a certain percentage of revenue on "trolling". What if, for example, only 25% of a company's revenue can be made off these "trolling" escapades? I think it would clean things up quite a bit.
- joesb 13y ago
  So big company can infringe on small company's patents with tiny revenue because if it's cheaper than actually buying the license?
  - curiousquestion 13y ago
    The rule should be for NPE only. In otherwords, as soon as you can prove that the idea is making you money (even if it's a small amount) the ceiling comes off. This doesn't mean "NPE" no longer exists. For example, a business who has a revenue stream but haven't incorporated their invention into their products yet, but want to claim the invention is worth alot. Why aren't you making money on it yourself if it's worth so much?
jheriko 13y ago
still about a million miles away from good enough. but a nice attempt a political manouveur when $100k dollars is considered a low cost, someone is living in cuckoo land... how about charging people this for failed patent applications? or just no patents at all? nearly all of the arguments for patents are trivially in the worst interest of the wider public... frankly its an embarassment that the system exists at all, much less in the way that it does
otikik 13y ago
It will not work. I'm pessimistic like that.
- vog 13y ago
  Care to elaborate?
throwawaykf 13y ago
Anyone interested in getting a better understanding of the economic reality of trolls is encouraged to go to ssrn.com and do a quick search for "patent trolls". These are not all peer reviewed papers, but many of them have data and methodologies and, most importantly, numbers. Read only the abstracts, if you're short on time. As always, the topic is so much more nuanced than "good" or "bad". The first result, "Patent Troll Myths" by Michael Risch is a good start. Sure, you will find the papers by Bessen et al where the "trolls cost the economy 29 Billion" meme comes from. But you'll also find a paper (by Schwartz and Kesan) that debunks Bessen's paper, which got nearly 0 coverage in the press. You'll even find a paper showing trolls have better patents than average! But these tend to get settled quickly, so typically the poorer ones go to trial, and so you get papers (like from Lemley) showing that trolls lose more cases than average. You'll also find papers arguing the benefits of trolls, debunking some of the common arguments against trolls, and introducing new previously unconsidered harms of patent trolls. And of course, just like there's no clear definition of "software patents", there is no clear definition of "patent trolls" either, and you'll find papers discussing this. And because they use different data sets, different papers look at the same problem at the same time and reach completely opposite conclusions. And further, because the authors are almost never practitioners in the field, you get some really obvious findings being reported... and then misconstrued! For instance there's a paper showing litigation has shot up since 2007, and presenting various theories, completely missing the Medimmune v Genntech decision that effectively upended the rules of patent licensing. And there's the paper that argues patent quality is dropping because more patents were being issued, without being aware of the ending of the misguided "reject, reject, reject" unofficial policy instituted by former USPTO head Jon Dudas (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anonymous-patent-examiner/id=2190 http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anony...) And as always, it's helpful to keep in mind where the authors' funding comes from. Bessen of the "29 billion" fame, for instance, is funded by the "Coalition for Patent Fairness". Check out the list of supporters. It's almost ad hom, but hey, if we can point out that studies showing the harms of piracy are often funded by the MPAA, we can point this out too. Yes, there are clear bad actors like Lodsys, but there are so many more variables out there, and many are arguably helping more than harming. Yet, somehow, it's only one small side of the story that gets told. As this is a hot-button topic, we should take an objective look at the data. Because, quoting from one of the papers above, "Without a better understanding of the many complicated effects of patents in high technology markets, we run the very real risk of misguided policy decisions."
joshlegs 13y ago
So I got to speak with Bob Goodlatte a few times before. I generally considered him a generic shmuck, but this legislation is pretty impressive. Kudos, Bobby.
jschnell13 13y ago
finally is right
TallboyOne 13y ago
Thank mother of god and all that is holy. This &$&$ bullshit has gone on long enough.

448 points by drob 13y ago

> It isn't just HappyTroll LLC or whatever shell company was set up that week that's going to be on the hook for fees. The fees can be applied to any "interested party" in the case. That's good, but the pessimist in me thinks IV could probably find a way around this too, but maybe not. Modifying the law to somehow identify patent troll originators (IV) and barring them from disbursing patents to NPEs would seem like some added protection.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
NPEs per se aren't a problem. Discriminating against them is unjust.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  Unless a company is in the business of producing things its patents cover, it isn't utilizing the patent system as intended. I fail to see how barring a Non Practicing Entity from litigating patents it isn't actually using in a real, product making capacity is unjust. It seems perfectly reasonable to me, in fact.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - cperciva 13y ago
    Part of the purpose of the patent system is to allow individual inventors and small companies to develop technology even if they won't have the resources to produce and sell it. The ideal situation is that these NPEs go out to the large companies in an industry and say "hey, we've got this invention you might be interested in...". If NPEs are barred from litigating patents, there's nothing to stop those large companies from saying "great, we're going to use this... but not pay you anything, because there's nothing you can do about it".
    - whopa 13y ago
      What if the law was that NPEs are barred from litigating patents, unless the NPE was the original inventor. Wouldn't that solve this?
      - L_Rahman 13y ago
        The problem in this case there are many instances where the original inventor is not interested in taking on the risk of sales based licensing and so sells the patent for a lump sum to a third party.
      - cperciva 13y ago
        That would solve some problems but create others. If it's "original inventor" rather than "original inventor and heirs" you've just created an incentive to assassinate inventors (and a disincentive to invent if you're getting old). Even if it's "original inventor and heirs", you've created a liquidity process -- if you're a chemist with lung cancer, it would be great if you could sell your novel synthesis in order to pay for your cancer treatments rather than needing to start selling drugs yourself. And then there's the problem of defining what a "practicing" entity is, of course. Someone who has at least one customer? Someone who has used the invention themselves? Someone who was planning on building a product, but didn't get into YC and ended up working at Microsoft instead while he tries to license his invention to raise money to pay for his next startup idea?
        whopa 13y ago
        "original inventor and heirs" seems reasonable. I don't follow the chemist example. The patent is still valuable to companies who do want to productize it, or even companies that don't. Companies can still buy and hold patents without doing anything with them, it's just that they are barred from litigating them. They can still resell the patent to someone else, potentially for a profit. A "practicing" entity has either brought a product to market, or uses the invention themselves in the process of building a product on the market. Someone who is planning on building a product but has no funds doesn't get to litigate unless they are the original inventor. Your last example seems to imply that they are the original inventor.
  - qq66 13y ago
    Unequal treatment of NPEs acts against specialization of skills/division of labor. Invention, Manufacturing, and Litigation are three entirely different skills. If an inventor has to start some token manufacturing operations to monetize his patent, that manufacturing will be subscale and inefficient. If the manufacturer has to litigate and cannot sell the patent to litigation specialist firms, they will be distracting themselves from their core business. The ability to sell an asset is an important one for an efficient economy.
    - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
      Your first paragraph consists effectively of assertions without any sort of empirical support, and the second is at best an inappropriate generalization. The ability to sell assets, in general, may be important for an efficient economy, but not necessarily in the case of specific assets, in this case patents, if you care to call them 'assets'. Why should patents be assignable or transferable anyway? The assignment or transfer of a patent necessarily implies the original holder isn't interested in the state-conferred monopoly that a patent is, and therefore he's not interested in having a monopoly on the invention the patent covers. To my mind, the assignment of a patent should immediately expire and/or invalidate it.
      - stormbrew 13y ago
        > The assignment or transfer of a patent necessarily implies the original holder isn't interested in the state-conferred monopoly that a patent is, and therefore he's not interested in having a monopoly on the invention the patent covers. It means no such thing. The monopoly has value whether they go through with production themselves or sell it. Selling it just realizes the value in the short term rather than the long.
        Iftheshoefits 13y ago
        The monopoly no longer has value to the original holder once he sells it. He has realized the entire value of the monopoly for a short term profit. This isn't incompatible with the notion that, effective immediately upon such realization of value, the patent should expire. You may disagree that it should expire at that point; in which case we'll have to agree to disagree.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Can you explain? On the face of it, an entity without any skin in the game (i.e., can't be sued, it'll just fold and re-emerge as another company) sounds like a complete abuse of the system.
  - elliotanderson 13y ago
    It's because you can have "good" NPE's. Take ARM Holdings for example, they do not manufacture their own chips but rather licenses their designs to other semiconductor manufacturers.
    - gngeal 13y ago
      How exactly are ARM Holdings "an NPE"? They're definitely practicing - they're using their patents in their designs. They also attempt to shoot down any independent implementation of the ISA, for that matter.
      - Daniel_Newby 13y ago
        ARM does not reduce its inventions to practice. It is not the hardware description language files that are subject to patents but the chips that embody those files. Another valuable example of this is a patent pool consortium, a corporation that exists to bring all patents in a field together for easy licensing.
        gngeal 13y ago
        "ARM does not reduce its inventions to practice." "Reduce inventions to practice?" First, I don't think that my country has any such legalese in our patent law. Second, what does that make NVIDIA? Or ATI? They don't make their own chips either. Third, I believe that what is protected by most of these patents are neither HDL files nor the chips but rather specific implementation techniques for parts of the HDL implementation of the ISA. If the chips were patented, it would be worthless because you could do an independent design.

tzs 13y ago

Interesting legal fact: although the Constitution bars ex post facto laws, that only applies to criminal law. A retroactive tax is legal. One of the reasons trolls have been successful is that the patent office is understaffed, and of the staff it does have, not enough are experts in software related matters. This means things get through that might not have if the PTO had more and better trained examiners. If reforming to eliminate patent trolls, how about tossing in a nice big retroactive tax on patent trolls to help fund improvements in patent examining?

drob 13y ago
That's fascinating if true, since the power to tax is the power to destroy. I don't see a clean division around a domain on which a retroactive tax is justified. I had a hard time coming up with a good citation for this. Retroactive taxes seem to be legally controversial whenever introduced, and they're usually retroactive only to the beginning of the year introduced. Could you point me towards a better link?
- drivingmissm 13y ago
  Yeah I've never heard of that, even retroactive tax in a given year is new and controversial. I'd have to think that a massive retroactive tax would be considered an unconstitutional takings.
dsrguru 13y ago
I don't think it's possible to have a retroactive tax on instances of patent trolling, as opposed to patents in general. In order for this to be a tax and not a fine, it seems like it would need to be a tax on the patent application, not on bringing and losing a patent lawsuit. And in order to determine at the point of application whether or not a patent will be used for trolling (which we might define as whether the patent will be used in a lawsuit by an entity that holds the patent but does not itself employ the patent's "invention"), the USPTO would need to be able to read the future.
chii 13y ago
>One of the reasons trolls have been successful is that the patent office is understaffed this can be combated by making patent examination a peer review process, in a similar vein to scientific papers.

rayiner 13y ago

The pleading requirement is very important. On of the basic tools courts use to filter out frivolous litigation is to quickly dispose of suits that are implausible on their face. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Atlantic_Corp._v._Twombly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Atlantic_Corp._v._Twombly. Until this bill, the pleadings in patent cases were often ridiculously vague. Like filing a lawsuit against Best Buy saying: "Best Buy was negligent" without making any more specific allegations that could be used to evaluate the complaint on its face. As an aside, there are a lot of parallels between the litigation system under the federal rules and computer systems. In patent litigation, you have a phase that is extremely slow and expensive (claim construction). How can you minimize the average cost? One way is to try and filter out as many easy cases early in the pipeline so you hit the slow path as little as possible.

ihsw 13y ago

One has to wonder how this will affect the TPP, and other greater patent wars across the world.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago

I know healthcare is really important, but I think this bill is also up there when it comes to the long term financial viability of our nation. Intellectual Ventures and all these other no-talent, pirate scum need to go down. If not, my children and your children will be working for bean soup while some cocksucker in a suit extracts rents for "intellectual" property rights based on some goddamn scrap of paper with no connection to reality. Gonna call my senator and congress woman tomorrow. And then I'm going to tell everyone I know to do the same. Intellectual Ventures and these other pantywaste dirtbags are going to be lobbying hard against this bill, so the only thing we can do (unless you have some millions of dollars to spare on lobbying) is to call people and spread the word. That worked for SOPA, so maybe it can work now too. Go, go, go!

iwwr 13y ago
Intellectual Ventures is now the bitter pill tech giants have to swallow to maintain their intellectual monopolies. With legislation that makes trolling impossible, but still maintains the legal privileges, large companies will have their cake and eat it too. It would mean there's nothing stopping the likes of Oracle or Microsoft from lobbying for harsher penalties, looser rules and longer terms for patent law in general. The cure for this problem would be a refutation of patents wholesale, or at the very least a repeal of software and algorithmic patents. Patent trolling isn't a problem that's distinct from legal patent enforcement, it just means some "little guys" can steal some of the intellectual free lunch the large companies have been having.
- AlisdairO 13y ago
  Agreed. Patent trolling isn't the problem - it's a symptom of the wider issue that far too many obvious patents are granted. The reason NPEs are perceived as a problem is because they break mutually assured destruction. If the patent system were working as intended, we wouldn't need MAD, because it would be possible to write a nontrivial computer program that didn't infringe on someone's patent. I have no real problem with the concept of an NPE, if their patents are genuinely worthwhile.

freakyterrorist 13y ago

Good start but it would be great to see something targeting trolls which threaten small companies and individuals, maybe something forcing them to do a class action against all companies that use Apple IAP frameworks rather than allowing them to target everyone one on one.

dlitz 13y ago

This basically shoots the messenger. NPEs just expose a greater problem with the patent system, which people like rms and others have warning about for years. What we need is actual reform of the patent system, not just sweeping the problem under the rug by singling out "trolls".

swatkat7 13y ago

YES!! I don't think ideas need to be protected if you can back it with great execution. Ideas aren't unique, can never be. As René Girard said, all desires (and hence ideas) are mimetic! So, I don't buy into the philosophy that ideas need to be guarded. It curtails innovation. A couple of years ago when I was building a product, our board convinced us to apply for a patent. After a provisional application and following it up with a proper submission, we finally had an offer that granted us the patent. Never pursued it. I know, it makes sense to protect your ideas; but we had Whatsapp, Pinger and other apps kicking ass in the space.

curiousquestion 13y ago

I like the idea that NPE can only make a certain percentage of revenue on "trolling". What if, for example, only 25% of a company's revenue can be made off these "trolling" escapades? I think it would clean things up quite a bit.

joesb 13y ago
So big company can infringe on small company's patents with tiny revenue because if it's cheaper than actually buying the license?
- curiousquestion 13y ago
  The rule should be for NPE only. In otherwords, as soon as you can prove that the idea is making you money (even if it's a small amount) the ceiling comes off. This doesn't mean "NPE" no longer exists. For example, a business who has a revenue stream but haven't incorporated their invention into their products yet, but want to claim the invention is worth alot. Why aren't you making money on it yourself if it's worth so much?

jheriko 13y ago

still about a million miles away from good enough. but a nice attempt a political manouveur when $100k dollars is considered a low cost, someone is living in cuckoo land... how about charging people this for failed patent applications? or just no patents at all? nearly all of the arguments for patents are trivially in the worst interest of the wider public... frankly its an embarassment that the system exists at all, much less in the way that it does

otikik 13y ago

It will not work. I'm pessimistic like that.

vog 13y ago
Care to elaborate?

throwawaykf 13y ago

Anyone interested in getting a better understanding of the economic reality of trolls is encouraged to go to ssrn.com and do a quick search for "patent trolls". These are not all peer reviewed papers, but many of them have data and methodologies and, most importantly, numbers. Read only the abstracts, if you're short on time. As always, the topic is so much more nuanced than "good" or "bad". The first result, "Patent Troll Myths" by Michael Risch is a good start. Sure, you will find the papers by Bessen et al where the "trolls cost the economy 29 Billion" meme comes from. But you'll also find a paper (by Schwartz and Kesan) that debunks Bessen's paper, which got nearly 0 coverage in the press. You'll even find a paper showing trolls have better patents than average! But these tend to get settled quickly, so typically the poorer ones go to trial, and so you get papers (like from Lemley) showing that trolls lose more cases than average. You'll also find papers arguing the benefits of trolls, debunking some of the common arguments against trolls, and introducing new previously unconsidered harms of patent trolls. And of course, just like there's no clear definition of "software patents", there is no clear definition of "patent trolls" either, and you'll find papers discussing this. And because they use different data sets, different papers look at the same problem at the same time and reach completely opposite conclusions. And further, because the authors are almost never practitioners in the field, you get some really obvious findings being reported... and then misconstrued! For instance there's a paper showing litigation has shot up since 2007, and presenting various theories, completely missing the Medimmune v Genntech decision that effectively upended the rules of patent licensing. And there's the paper that argues patent quality is dropping because more patents were being issued, without being aware of the ending of the misguided "reject, reject, reject" unofficial policy instituted by former USPTO head Jon Dudas (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anonymous-patent-examiner/id=2190 http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anony...) And as always, it's helpful to keep in mind where the authors' funding comes from. Bessen of the "29 billion" fame, for instance, is funded by the "Coalition for Patent Fairness". Check out the list of supporters. It's almost ad hom, but hey, if we can point out that studies showing the harms of piracy are often funded by the MPAA, we can point this out too. Yes, there are clear bad actors like Lodsys, but there are so many more variables out there, and many are arguably helping more than harming. Yet, somehow, it's only one small side of the story that gets told. As this is a hot-button topic, we should take an objective look at the data. Because, quoting from one of the papers above, "Without a better understanding of the many complicated effects of patents in high technology markets, we run the very real risk of misguided policy decisions."

joshlegs 13y ago

So I got to speak with Bob Goodlatte a few times before. I generally considered him a generic shmuck, but this legislation is pretty impressive. Kudos, Bobby.

jschnell13 13y ago

finally is right

TallboyOne 13y ago

Thank mother of god and all that is holy. This &$&$ bullshit has gone on long enough.