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Ten States Pass Anti-Patent-Troll Laws, With More To Come
An anonymous reader writes "With patent reform stalled in the Senate, many states have decided to take up the issue themselves. 'As states kicked off their legislative sessions this winter, lawmakers responded to the threats against small businesses by writing bills that would ban "bad faith patent assertions" as a violation of consumer-protection laws. The bills target a specific type of patent troll: the kind that sends out vaguely worded letters demanding licensing fees. The thousands of letters sent out by the "scanner trolls" at MPHJ Technology are often brought up as a case-in-point. The new laws allow trolls that break rules around letter-writing to be sued in state court, either by private companies they've approached for licensing fees, or by state authorities themselves.'"
Unless Texas is on that list, I'll give the states an "atta-boy", but it's not as though it will make a serious difference except for smaller business that can't afford regional offices. And let's face it, they're not the serious problem, since it's really only larger firms and patent trolls who go out of their way to set up offices in East Texas that are the problem.
Well, here's hoping that the federal government does the right thing here eventually. I'm typically not one to jump with knee-jerk reactions in favor of government regulation, as over-regulation gone overboard can have a stifling effect on business. Any reasonable analysis demonstrates massive and obvious problems with the current patent system, and the private sector has absolutely demonstrated an inability to handle this problem in a sane solution. In fact, the private sector has gleefully demonstrated that it's perfectly willing to exploit the situation and actually make a fucking business out of the problem. That's about the time for the government to step in and put the hammer down.
The only danger is that whenever the government steps in, there's a very real danger of making a problem worse despite all the best intentions. The individual state's efforts real legacy may be of giving some real, working examples of how to potentially fix the issue before it's tried out on a national level - that's certainly not unprecedented.
BTW, does anyone know why, in fact, the senate's patent reform bill is actually being held up (other than "politics" or "lobbyist")?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This is pointless since patents are administered by federal law. Any troll wanting to extort money is going to sue in an out of state venue (preferably Texas), immediately stepping up to the federal courts.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
6092 patent lawsuits were filed in 2013, a 12.4% increase over 2012.
That figure's a bit misleading. Thanks to the AIA and several legitimate patent reform acts, patent trolls can't sue "Microsoft and Google and Apple and Joe Schmoe from Florida" in one suit anymore, something they did to force reasonable venues in Texas (halfway between Joe Shmoe and the other parties). So, now they file three suits against Microsoft, Apple, and Google, and leave Joe Schmoe out - 3 times the suits, 75% of the defendants, which is actually an improvement.
Making 'patent law' a nightmare IS the goal behind the laws. If laws are different in every state it makes patent trolling much harder (which makes things unprofitable).
Please don't use the term "Intellectual Property" to describe the clause of the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Intellectual property is a modern day term meant to confuse the differences between copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
Most of the "patent troll" problem comes from three law firms. They're the only ones who've sent out more than two demand letters, according to the EFF.
This is about the threat letters, not about actual court cases. If they really will have a case, they will start an actual case, is the idea behind these laws. Trying to threaten someone by claiming you will sue them for a high amount of dollars if they don't pay up a few hundred will be made illegal, not actually the actual suing. This is more about the extortion and blackmail part of the letters than the actual court cases that might ensue.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Using a modern day corruption of the concepts to describe the initial writings further confuses the relevant issues.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) for monopoly privileges...[snip]...In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual."[7] The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears."[8] The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years."[9] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. - WP link
The advent of Hollywood in the 20th century did two things, created wealthy and respectable citizens out of previously "immoral" entertainers, changed the notion of copyright from a temporary monopoly on property into an eternal property right, the computer industry came up with machines that could be anything you told them to be, the conceptual distinction between ideas and iron vanished and they were able to gain the protections afforded by both copyright and patent law.
I want to see IP law radically reformed: Art would be sponsored not sold, research would be sponsored not sold, software would be serviced not sold, scientific discoveries would be treated the same way as a finding an ancient "treasure trove", depending on it's value to society you either get to keep it in your head or the state publishes it and hand you a token cash reward commensurate with it's perceived value to society.
That's simply not going to happen in my life time, nor would I want it to happen "overnight" since such a rapid switch in basic property law would probably throw the global economy into black hole. It's taken at least 100yrs for the social pendulum to overshoot "reasonable" in the author's/inventor's favour. If you want to help push it back the other way, publishing conspiracy theories on Slashdot is not the way to do it. Getting your facts straight would be a start but "being right" may not help, politics is all about "being listened to" and nothing makes a politicians ears prick up more than the sound of a pen scratching against a cheque book.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yay! This is what I've been saying for years! It's great to have someone agree with me. You've laid it out in a much more eloquent way than I ever had.
I'm a musician and an inventor. Everything I create I give away for free. I do the standard: Make a video of how to do it and post it. Thing. When I write a song I upload all the individual tracks so other people can, for example, take out the guitar and jam along if it helps them. etc... The art world would be far richer if more people did the same. Just try to go online and find just the drum track for some song so you can practice along with it... it's very rare.
I find it disgusting when I go to conventions or clubs and some dudes made a cool jig or tool, I ask him how he did it and he tells me its a trade secret but he can sell me one. I think the whole handyman community is thankfully turning that way. Imagine if Galileo had kept the telescope a secret...
I would try to avoid states that pass laws like this. Clearly this is a Federal matter.
And Congress has been shown themselves to be right on top of this issue too... [/sarcasm]
Congress has shown zero appetite for dealing with this matter. Until they can actually be bothered to do something in the interest of the country I'm fine with states taking up the slack where they can.