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Patent Troll Bill Clears House With Huge Majority
snydeq writes "The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Innovation Act, dealing trolls a severe blow despite opposition from universities looking to protect patents, InfoWorld's Simon Phipps reports. The act cleared the House of Representatives with an overwhelming majority of 325 to 91 despite opposition from the organizations most likely to feed new patents to the trolls. 'So bravo to the Innovation Act. It's far from perfect, as the EFF documents and as I commented before the holiday. But it's a step in the right direction, and the tidal surge of support it's seeing suggests legislators' appetite for proper patent reform is finally growing strong enough for them to contemplate substantial change.'"
Actually they didn't go far enough. There are provisions in this bill to protect business process patents because of lobbying by IBM, Microsoft et al.
Hopefully the Senate will fix this up.
As Obama has said he supports this bill and it has broad bipartisan support it's likely to pass the Senate easily.
The House has got it spot on. Now for the Senate and President.
It's pretty much a fact that the Dems (of which I have been a lifelong member) both own the Senate, and are owned by many of the people (universities, high tech, and so on) that value patents.
The Senate will not pass this, and what a shame.
With a 325 - 91 margin it's got to make more than a few feel a bit uncomfortable about opposing it. It's also not the Apple vs Samsung sort of patent trolling, it's the scum who keep filling those courthouses in Eastern Texas.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I rather think writing to my senator did help make a difference on the PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA). One of my senators, Cornyn, sponsored PIPA. When Wikipedia went dark, I emailed his office, blaming the outage squarely on SOPA and PIPA. I was surprised and pleased when I heard he backed away, saying it needed more study. Apparently so many people wrote about the issue that he felt it was safer to disappoint his backers than tempt the wrath of that many people.
Checking on this, it seems he even tried to rewrite history, suggesting that he opposed PIPA all along. At any rate, on the Wikipedia entry about SOPA and PIPA, he's listed as "opposed" and his former position in support is not mentioned. There's something ironic about that.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"Of course, no one has actually made any good reasoning why requiring patents is somehow good."
FTFY.
Most patent justifications only make sense in the context of a patent regime. They're not independently supportable.
1) Patents force inventors to publish their invention so it can be copied.
- The real function of publication is to reduce duplicative patents, and to put potential infringers on notice. Most inventions are discovered simultaneously or nearly so, based on the natural progression of science and the technical arts.
2) Patents provide incentive for large capital expenditure burdened by the free rider problem.
- It's been shown time-and-time again with empirical studies that patents are unnecessary. Just like monopoly concessions are unnecessary in almost every other facet of our free market economy. Do you need a monopoly concession to open a restaurant, to prevent competitors? No. To create Twitter? No. SpaceX? No.
3) By packaging "ideas" into transferable property, you incentive investments because the product concept can be collateralized.
- Patents are often desired by investors, but what investor wouldn't you want to make use of regulatory property, regardless of whether it makes sense for the larger economy. Every investor wants you to maximize opportunities at your disposal.
- More important to a company than inventions are their employees, who create those inventions. And yet, places like Silicon Valley have been shown to be more innovative than others (e.g. Boston/Cambridge), with a healthier startup and investment community, despite the fact that California out-right rejects non-compete clauses in regular employment contracts, unlike almost every other state (including Massachusetts).
Once I found out that about 4-8 companies file half of all patent suits (and 90% of the troll ones), I figured it shouldn't be THAT hard to make it unprofitable for those companies to continue. Some say this bill isn't perfect, but if it manages to take enough profit our of trolling to stop those few big trolls, that largely solves the problem.