White House takes steps against patent trolls

[Recursion]

Source: IT World

The U.S. White House will launch new efforts aimed at combating abusive patent lawsuits, including a website to assist defendants of patent lawsuits brought by so-called patent trolls.

President Barack Obama's administration on Thursday launched a website at http://USPTO.gov/patentlitigation with information to assist people and businesses targeted in patent lawsuits or receiving patent demand letters.

The website may be the first aimed at assisting defendants and recipients of demand letters from patent assertion entities (PAEs), businesses that have patent lawsuits and demand letters as their primary business model, said Michelle Lee, deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The White House also announced it would launch a new crowdsourcing initiative focused on identifying prior art, evidence of existing inventions that the USPTO can use to reject bad patent claims.

Read more: http://www.itworld.com/it-management/406070/white-house-takes-steps-against-patent-trolls

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Cool. The prior art crowdsourcing thing is one a lot of the tech world has been clamoring for for a while now...

[groundloop]

1. This is badly needed

Corporate patent attorneys have become very good at obtaining patents for the sole purpose of locking competitors out of a market. I've been involved in a few patents and have found that it's ridiculous what some corporations have won patents on.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. This is awesome.

Badly needed, as long as it's not a sham of some sort.

[Renew Deal]

3. Patent trolls are basically gangster organizations

Anything that can be done to stop them (and make their lives miserable) should be done.

[Archae]

4. How exactly do they operate?

Not too clear on this.

[Recursion]

5. Buy up failed companies with patents for (relative) chump change

Organize those patents into a large searchable database.

Using some pretty impressive matching algorithms, find every single granted patent or marketed product that could conceivably be argued to infringe on one of those patents. (Keep in mind that some of these patents are, seriously, as absurdly generic as "showing ads rather than charging for content" or "automatically sending emails to the admin when a website goes down".)

At this point there are two options: "shotgun" and "torpedo".

The shotgun approach is to simply send out patent infringement letters to every single match, on the hope that they'll figure a $500 "license fee" that makes the guy go away is better than dealing with litigation.

The torpedo approach is to watch these products, and when one of them gets big, hit them with a huge lawsuit for a chunk of the profits.

What's important (to me) is that this isn't done by the inventors and innovative small businesses that the patent system is there to protect. It's done by people who buy up tons and tons of unused patents (many of which were never turned in to a usable product) and just try to siphon off other people's work.

One interesting idea I've heard is the suggestion that to be able to enforce a patent, you have to show some sign of actually developing the product. There are downsides to that, too, but I think it's worth considering.

[jmowreader]

7. Your "interesting idea" is the way it used to work

When the earth was still solidifying, in order to get a patent you needed to make a working model of it. Today, not only do you NOT have to make a working model you don't even have to know how to make it.

Example from my past: I used to work at a company that made camouflage. Our "R&D" guy found out about ceramic microspheres and filed a patent covering a thermal camouflage made with them. I was the production guy, and not only did I not then know how to make camouflage containing ceramic microspheres, I still don't know how to do it. Nor does anyone else.

[okaawhatever]

6. Good job. Much needed. nt

[Martak Sarno]

8. Not to worry

I'm sure it won't be retro active. Monsanto and its ilk are safe.