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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.'"
who were the corporate sponsors of this bill I wonder?
Does anyone know if this would have any effect on the arsenals of patents encumbering smartphone or apis (ie Oracle vs Google)?
-I'm just sayin'
The House has got it spot on. Now for the Senate and President.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Mandela advocated strongly for patent reform in his final years. Before he passed, he also stated a preference for the PS4 over the Xbone.
If this actually passes the Senate and Pres, I'll be shocked, shocked I say, that legislating was being done in the legislature.
Now is a good time to call, write, and email your senators to let them know that you want to see this bill passed AS IS.
"Among those apologists was the EVP of the Association of American Universities, whose press briefing Tuesday took the stance that patents are good for research."
Holy crap I don't even know where to start with that one. First of all, I remember when universities were for teaching. They seem to be under the impression that they're product manufacturers or R&D branches of some non-existent company. I wonder if they have a sign outside the door to the labs at these universities that say "forget teaching students, we need money! Welcome to the R&D Dept."
Oh and here's an idea. If you're doing research and want the final product or some related technology protected, don't let anyone know about it. In other words, don't file a patent. WD40 is not patented. The reason the company stated for that is so it's harder to reverse engineer the formula because if it had a patent, the recipe be out there for everyone to see. Nobody has, to this day, ever successfully figured out how to make a knock off of WD40.
Now the article states that this reduces the ability for 2 different universities to coordinate for fear of ripping the ideas off from each other. How about they either have professors teach students things like for example if they were some sort of university OR they become secret-protecting, profit-driven R&D company that only cares about making a profit off newly developed products. Just pick either one or the other and go with it instead of pretending to be both. Patents + universities don't mix because universities are acting like regular companies when they're not. THAT is the part that doesn't work, not the patent laws themselves.
Not much seems to be done about these draconian copyright laws we have.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
"Fanny Bottom" is the name of my (fictional) Ass, rather like "Anonymous Coward" is yours....
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
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.
I'm wondering what's the temperature in the Phlegethon.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h629
While the student debt machine pumps out a great amount of money, the icing is in Grants, and Universities who can and do research work with associated patents get crazy grant money for important things..you know..like golden bulls and stuff..
At least you don't fee like an Oracle error.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill. It's designed to make it more expensive to enforce patents. That won't affect Google vs Apple vs Microsoft, etc. It just makes it harder for a little company to enforce a patent against a big one. That was the intention. (The Leahy bill in the Senate isn't that bad, but the Goodlatte bill that just passed the House is awful.)
This bill has been pushed through by a hate campaign against inventors. It's a well-funded campaign, and it's suckered in many people. The money is coming from Google and Facebook, who are hiding behind front organizations such as the Application Developers Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF's effort is funded by Google and Facebook, with $2 million laundered through a clever legal trick.
There are very few real "patent trolls". The EFF has tried to identify every one they can, and they only found 15. They started a campaign to attack "trolled patents" in court and at the USPTO, and and they only found one. There are a few other broad patents being enforced aggressively, notably Ultramercial. That's about it.
Using that thin basis, the "patent troll" problem has been hyped as a major threat. There are hate sites aimed at inventors:
I used to respect the EFF, but once they took Google's money, they, too, turned to the dark side.
No, inventors are not the target of this legislation. I am an entrepreneur, multi-startup founder, product creator of products that have shipped hundreds of thousands of units and products that have failed (always important to add). I hold over a dozen patents or patents pending. I have also had my startups threatened by patent litigation from trolls. A lot of things about creating companies and products are difficult but being assaulted by patent trolls is one of the worst because there is nothing the entrepreneur can do except pay off a thug or pay off lawyers to defend against the thug. Either way, the small inventor loses crucial capital, focus and energy.
I've read the current language of the bill and there is nothing there that harms small inventors. Everything there makes large-scale patent trolling less attractive as a business model. As a small inventor I have no problem disclosing my ownership in my patents. I have no problem specifying what product I believe infringes one of my patents and in what way. I have no problem with a judge being able to shift court costs to the losing party, if the judge determines that party was not acting in good faith in bringing the suit. I wouldn't bring a suit in bad faith, nor abuse the discovery process or otherwise try to egregiously abuse legal tactics to run up costs. That's what trolls do. Not legitimate inventors. All of these provisions PROTECT me as a small inventor. Trolls generally go after small companies because they are the ones that must settle because they can't afford a costly defense.
If so, good then; the sooner the myth of patents being for the small inventor dies the sooner everyone will finally be rid of the impediment of patents forever.
May the Maths Be with you!
They teach too, but research has always been a part of it. Now if you don't want them getting patents and such on research that's fine, but then you need to increase funding. Part of the issue is that states have continually cut funding to universities. If that money isn't being paid in by the state, it needs to come from other sources, either higher tuition, or more research dollars.
I've read the current language of the bill and there is nothing there that harms small inventors. Everything there makes large-scale patent trolling less attractive as a business model.
The worst part is the remnant of the "loser pays" provision. If you try to enforce a patent against a big company, if you lose you have a good chance of being hit with the big guy's legal bills. There's no cap on that. That provision was amended, which made it "slightly less awful", as one congressman put it. After the amendment, the new language now means you get to litigate over the legal fees. Statistically, the patent holder wins about 40% of the time, and even with a good case, it's easy to make a mistake and lose.
The Leahy bill is better. It's more narrowly directed towards bulk-type patent enforcement operations, doesn't have a loser-pays provision, and proposes a small claims court for smaller patent cases.
English-writing world does the logical thing
That's because they don't speak English in the US, they speak American.
The use of the term "Ta-ta" should have clued you in that the poster was likely non-American and using the British convention of writing. Therefore, the use of the full stop (that's the British term for period) inside quotations is correct as per British convention.
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
At least you don't fee like an Oracle error.
That's still better than being a Windows error because they don't even know who they are.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
While I do in fact feel some empathy for people who create new material in terms of copyright / patents, this is a long time coming. We can't have a functioning system when everybody and their brother can clog up the works with useless patents describing a method (but which would be completely worthless as instructions to actually do it), and without proving that they've in fact done it and it works, and without even making it available to the public in terms of continuing to sell the product.
Also, the whole point of the patent system was to encourage people to create while also keeping the value of the works around after the rights expired. Half of that equation is rendered moot when the lifetime of a patent keeps extending. So what we'll have instead is a dying and increasingly useless system bogged down by patent trolls gouging creators for money while they don't provide any value whatsoever to society.
It's my understanding, and the GP who read the whole thing states, that the plaintiff pays the defendant's fees only if the sued IN BAD FAITH. The little guy can freely sue the big company if they have "a good faith belief" that the big company is infringing. It's pretty tough to prove bad faith, that the plaintiff didn't think they had a case. That comes into play when a plaintiff pulls crap like lying to the court about who their client is, and forging an inventor's signature - the crap the worst patent trolls do.
It seems that ACTA was defeated, primarily because so many millions wrote or called their representatives.
What is the alternative to writing? Lie down, and whimper like a whipped dog? If that appeals to you, then go for it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Now I'm kind of worried what is wrong with it. This is the chamber that wanted to bankrupt the country in order to block healthcare reform.
Of course, maybe it just had a rider that killed ACORN another few hundred times.
Ah, the famous: "An error has occurred because: an error has occurred"
This bill looks like a trojan horse scam. The difference between a valid patent and troll patent can be very subjective. Can someone knowledgeable about the law explain how this bill affects inventors of a valid, non-troll patent? This is other than the 60% chance of paying a big corporation's legal fees if he/she loses a patent fight.
Punctuation is applied within the quotation marks, so this should be written as "then."
In US English, true. But in British English the sentence was correctly punctuated as it stood, and putting the stop inside the quotes would be seen as a blunder (or resented as a creeping Americanism).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
a fix for the shell company problem could be
1 have the Execs PERSONALLY on the hook for losing the case
2 require that a company suing over or being sued for a patent exist intact for the entire length of the suit
3 require that the liabilities of a company be sold with the assets (no turkey carving tricks you buy 25% of a companies assets you get 25% of the liabilities "For Free")
4 part of the penalty for violating a VALID patent is you lose the same amount in other patents you have (or cash value)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.
Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.
You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.
If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.
Sorry, Lembke had an improvement of todays magnetic bearings, not today's magnetic gears.
If you ever want to explain to the layperson how damaging patent trolls are, point them to this episode of This American Life.
It's patently ridiculous...
(Note: Although it says Part Two, it's really the whole thing - they include Part One into this episode).
Beetle B.
Thank you for that quote from the bill as it stands now. That's good that it includes "or if .. make an award unjust".
98% of the time, judges are pretty good at seeing who is the asshole, who is the good guy, etc. Of course 2% of the time they screw it up and in those cases various web sites scream about it while significantly exaggerating the situation.
I enjoyed the completely unnecessary commas and missing hyphenation in the main comment, too.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You do realize that if we were to execute this "party engaging in evil must be crucified" idea that I keep hearing thrown around on Slashdot, sooner or later it would be used on those it was intended to protect, right?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I'm American but the British are right (about this). Punctuation punctuates, where you put it shows what you're punctuating. If it's a quotation within a sentence, and the punctuation is the sentences' punctuation, the punctuation goes outside. He didn't understand the word "outside". If the phrase within the sentence is what's punctuated, the punctuation goes inside the quote. "Peter is a jerk," he said. "And what a jerk!"
Free Martian Whores!
Yes, you're right. My mistake.
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.