Posts Tagged: "Patent Trolls"

High-Tech Groups and EFF Revive Patent Troll Narrative and Other Lies

Efforts by high-tech companies to undermine both the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023 and the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership (PREVAIL) Act ramped up this week, with a joint letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee by a number of tech industry organizations on Monday and a campaign launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday.

Finding the Trolls: My Mission to Understand Why We Need the PTAB

I was told that elected officials count on—in fact, they need—constituent input to be effective legislators. After my patents were unjustly cancelled at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), I started the journey to do this very thing. Since January of 2022, I have visited Congress and the Senate two dozen times. I have visited over 200 offices telling my story and advocating for the “little” inventors, like me.

Big Tech’s Great Patent Troll Smash and Grab

Big Tech’s patent troll narrative is really just the great Big Tech smash and grab. Jean Ann Booth explains in the Waco Tribune what patent trolls are by taking Big Tech’s cartoonish characterization as her own: Patent trolls are rich investors who buy up patents from failed startups just so they can sue companies commercializing the invention in order to extort their money. Extortion – that’s what patent trolls do. And they are wrecking U.S. innovation to boot. They sure sound scary. Patent trolls are indeed frightening. Flush with big bucks, Big Tech lobbyists pushed the patent troll narrative on Congress, the administration, and the courts, demanding that we gut U.S. patent law (the same U.S. patent law that drove over 200 years of American innovation) if we are to save American innovation. Government bureaucrats and politicians complied by smashing the U.S patent system. Now Big Tech can grab whatever technology they want.

Becoming Harder to Justify a One-Size-Fits-All Patent System

Meanwhile, all patents— good, bad, revolutionary, and stupid— have eroded to the point where continued use of the U.S. patent system must be questioned. Despite the statute saying that patents are to be treated as property rights, the Supreme Court has ruled that patents are merely government franchises that can be stripped at any point in time during the life of the patent regardless of how much time or money has been invested by the patent owner. It simply cannot make any sense for all patents to become increasingly worthless simply because of the victimization of large multinational corporations who are incapable of crafting a strategy that solves the nuisance litigation problem that does not destroy the entire system.

Government Must Reform the ITC to Keep Pace with Innovation and Curb Trolls

In 2001, six years before the iPhone appeared, a futurist named Ray Kurzweil wrote that humankind would cram 20,000 years of technological progress into the century that had just begun. There were skeptics, but today any of the world’s six billion smartphone subscribers can read his essay on their devices practically any time, any place they choose. As we move into an era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and 5G telecommunications that supports Kurzweil’s vision, we must make sure that our laws and federal agencies match the pace of invention and protect innovators from trolls who would game the legal system and government functions for their ill-gained profit.