Regulators face a twofold challenge: First, they need to balance the legitimate interests of patent holders and licensees in order to determine which activities and contracts the law will enforce, or otherwise recognize as creating legal rights. Second, they need to establish rules that minimize both the costs of assessing a given case, and the costs of taking wrong decisions. One traditional approach has been to use antitrust law.
It is pure nonsense to say that opponents of patent reform never offer specifics, cite or discuss textual language of the bills. Utter fiction and complete fantasy. Frankly, Lee’s claims are as comical and insulting as they seem to be uninformed. Only the most disingenuous partisan could suggest that opponents of patent reform do not offer specific explanations citing to textual language of the bills. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. Opponents of patent reform make far more detailed and nuanced arguments. These intellectual, detailed, nuanced arguments have lead those fighting patent reform to lose the linguistic battle time and time again. So not only is what Lee saying false, but it is 180 degrees opposite from reality. So spurious are Lee’s claims that at first glance the article comes across as a piece of patent satire published by The Onion.
The first meeting this week was in Grundy Center, IA, during which a question about patent reform was asked. Grassley answered that he was trying to stop patent trolls, which he described as a person who buys up patents but never intends to build a product, and then sends threatening letters to small businesses demanding thousands of dollars or they will get sued. Notably, he said that it costs our economy $83B per year.