Slashdot Mirror
Who Helped Kill Patent Troll Reform In the Senate
First time accepted submitter VT-802-Software (3663479) writes "A bipartisan proposal to curb patent trolls was shelved by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Wednesday. 'Supporters of the compromise accuse trial lawyers, universities, pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies for foiling the plan at the eleventh hour. As late as Tuesday, the University of Vermont and a biotech coalition each sent letters to Leahy opposing the legislation. "We believe the measures in the legislation go far beyond what is necessary or desirable to combat abusive patent litigation, and would do serious damage to the patent system," reads one of the letters. "Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a patent troll."'"
Somehow, someone failed to omit the (D) that time.
A big moment for Slashdot.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Money can buy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a patent troll."'"
Oh but when it comes to regular citizen being treated like suspects because of a few rotten apples then thats ok but forbid this would happen to big money holders.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Mr. Lahey is a drunk bastard and always will be, he and Randy can fuck off.
It does not matter who stepped up to the plate this particular time.
Your system of government is corrupt and out of control.
Asking for names is not seeing the forest for the trees.
As long as lawyers are the majority of legislators you'll never see real patent *or* torte reform. End of story.
"Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a POTENTIAL patent troll." -Fixed that for you
I have never understood how overwhelmingly supported and popular legislation in a "so called" democracy, where every individual supposedly is allowed only one vote, can be killed by a single corrupt individual. I guess Orwell had it right after all. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
"Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a patent troll."' Name 5, right?
Stories are circulating that Harry Reid is the one who exerted pressure on Lahey to pull the bill.
Reid is as corrupt as they come.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Perhaps if patents held up to a profit threshold (derived from development costs) rather than a fixed duration, patents would be able to provide protection to innovators without feeding troll scum.
Supporters of the compromise accuse trial lawyers, universities, pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies for foiling the plan at the eleventh hour.
Lawyers? They suck. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies? Boo! Universities? Horr- wait, what?
If universities are opposed to the law, then that means that it probably defines "troll" as any non-practicing entity or those who make their income from licensing and litigation rather than sale of products, and therefore implicates research universities like MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell. And yeah, if the law is going to force them to abandon some of their research efforts, then it's a bad law. Patent trolls are a problem, but they need a targeted solution, not one that will damage an entire R&D industry.
For example, one of the big troll-y issues was suing tons of unrelated defendants in a single suit - like Microsoft in Seattle, and Google in Mountain View, and Apple in Cupertino, and Joe Shmoe Consumer in Florida... They had no interest in Joe, he only bought a single product that was alleged to infringe, but by including him, they could argue that Texas was halfway between everyone, so it was a good venue, rather than, say, Northern California. So, in the America Invents Act, they changed the joinder rules and said you could only include multiple defendants if they were explicitly working together to infringe, like subsidiaries or agent/principal relationships. Poof, overnight, Joe stopped getting sued. Good solution: targets the problem perfectly, doesn't harm legitimate inventors.
"Many of the provisions would have the effect of treating every patent holder as a patent troll."
Software should not have been patented, and software patents are indeed not allowed in Europe (although they are lobbying hard to bring the broken US system into Europe).
I am yet to see a software patent which worth the effort of reading and decoding its intentionally unclear text. In the best case they are basically direct applications of unpatentable mathematical knowledge produced by real scientists, and not the inventors mentioned in the patent.
So yes, anybody who uses software patents for litigation or for any other purpose except defending against a troll, is indeed a patent troll.
stick that in your patent reform hole and smoke it!
We have some very corrupt representation, people that routinely take in big bucks from business and use that to guide their decision making.
It's nothing new, but in the past Dems were less guilty of this, and now they do it flagrantly. It blurs the line between them and Republicans who do the same thing quite a bit.
So yeah, my team fucked up. Sorry.
to fight against those who write the laws.
I've given up on any hope of ever fixing this through negotiation or diplomacy. When the corruption has rooted itself so deeply into the host, sometimes the only way to save the rest is to sacrifice the one.
Burn it to the ground and be done with it.
He's referencing a crass Canadian show called Trailer Park Boys, specifically an episode called "Jim Lahey is a drunk bastard." Your post was on-topic for the story, but it was kind off-topic for who you replied to.
Just letting you know why you're modded off-topic.
It is already broken beyond repair.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It started last summer, when patent trolls started messing with one of the biggest political donors of all time - the National Association of Realtors.
If you take a look at Patrick Leahy's donors, you can see real estate is down the list.
Summary - this issue got before Congress only when the NAR was bitten by it. I don't the issue is dead, not by a long shot. The NAR has deep connections in government and unless they somehow get the issue to go away for them personally, anti-patent troll legislation is likely to come back. Perhaps more quietly next time.
Uh. The patent system is ALREADY royally fucked beyond belief.
This was supposed to be a first step to actually cleaning it up and making it work AS INTENDED.
Guess we couldn't have that happen. Not enough money in it for people...
Fuckers.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Stay classey, racist.
Who still buys into that garbage that only Republicans protect big business that the nice and friendly, warm and fuzzy, Democrats are the party of the People?
(Hint: They're the party of the Union bosses and every corporate lobbyist with a checkbook. At least the Republicans don't lie about it.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The "patent reform" that was proposed would make it impossible for individual inventors and small companies to get patents and enforce them. Currently, it costs approximately $10,000 in legal fees to get a patent. This is also takes, on average, between 3-5 years from when you file an application. Two years is the absolute minimum, but I have worked with clients who have had patent applications pending for as long as 12 years because of the incompetence and poor funding of the PTO. Then, if you want to enforce the patent, you have to be ready to either,(a) pay hundreds of thousands up to several million dollars to attorneys, or (b) give a large percentage of all recoveries to contingency counsel. However, contingency IP counsel will not pay for or handle Inter partes reviews (IPR) before the USPTO, which are now the norm for accused infringers to file. An IPR takes approximately 2-3 years from start to finish and will cost approximately $100k in attorney fees to the patent holder. Any enforcement action during this time is likely put on hold.
Now, the current reform is going to make it even riskier for patent holders. Not only will they have to outlay $110k to get the patent and to survive an IPR, plus give away 40% of any recoveries to contingency counsel. Now they will also have to worry that they will be on the hook for $500k - $4m that a corporate defendant will rack up against them. Now, you might think that a patent holder who knows that they have a valid patent should not worry about the risk in fee shifting. However, District Courts are overturned by the Fed. Circuit at approximately a 50% rate. Thus, a patent holder has to consider that the Court will get it wrong as much as they get it right. If you are a small or individual, you have to outlay $110,000 plus having a risk of having to pay someone who you think infringes your patent up to $4m dollars in case you lose. This relegates the patent system just to companies that can afford to pay the attorney fees of potential infringers.
Thus, with this "reform" the patent system will turn into a method for large corporate patent holders to use their patent holdings to keep competitors out of the marketplace (Microsoft doesn't care if they have to pay someone's attorney fees).
... it's the lack of effort in patent examination. The reason proper examination isn't being done is because patent applicants don't pay enough in fees. The time a patent examiner gets toward a case is a matter of hours: they are evaluated upon the number of cases they dispose of. It's easier to allow a case to issue with the appearance of proper search and examination, than it is to find proper grounds to make a legally valid rejection.
Patent trolls are merely people who take advantage of these facts.
What they really meant to say: "We don't mind the legislation, so long as it doesn't stop the gravy train. Your legislation would actually *do something* and we have found the extra income to be like winning the lottery every year. So the legislation must be stopped: make it as toothless as the Justice Department toward the banks after the 2008 financial crash, and we will be good."
A good example is to look at who has all the patents for graphene research. It mostly ain't us.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
You left your strawman out again. Please take him home, he's getting a little ragged.
because one of their biggest financial pillars is the trial lawyers (the type of lawyers who sue other people or defend people being sued). If you properly reform the patent system, you reduce the number of cases in the courts that need trial lawyers (on BOTH sides of every fight), you reduce the total number of "billable hours", and thus reduce campaign contributions to the Democrats. Incidentally, as Howard Dean (former DNC chairman) admitted this is the same reason why "Obamacare" included NO "tort reform" (reform of malpractice lawsuits) which would have reduced insane medical malpractice insurance rates, reduced unnecessary "defensive medicine" procedures, and would have driven down the costs of healthcare. Obamacare does not attack the costs of healcare so much as it attempts to drive down the cost of insurance to pay for that care, and because there's a big limit on that without tort reform, it tries to shift the money around to subsidize insurance for many people to pretend that it has lowered costs. At this point, somebody opposed to tort reform usually points to states that have done limited tort reform and says "it didn't lower costs THERE!" - but of course state-level reform cannot truly lower the potential payouts for malpractice policies (thereby making premium payments for such policies lower) as long as there are multi-state medical businesses and no national tort reform.
This is not some partisan trolling; Expecting laws that hit trial lawyers directly in the pocketbook under Democrats is about on par with expecting liberalization of abortion laws under Republicans - in each case you are expecting something that is nearly toxic to an important segment of the base of a party and therefore to that party's ability to raise funds. It's simply a FACT that trial lawyers give WAY more money to Democrats.
Our founders VERY EXPLICITLY did NOT create a Democracy (some of the most-famous like Adams and Franklin cautioned strongly against it). They created a "Constitutional Republic" with "Democratic elections" - Which means we have democratically-elected representatives AND a constitution that protects the political minority from the acts of the political majority (something NOT done in a "Democracy") no matter how much the majority wants to do those acts and votes for them. Our founders warned against forming a Democracy, in part, because all Democracies eventually devolve into tyranny-of-the-majority, financial insolvency, and collapse.
The bigger and more-invasive our government gets, the more it gets into every single aspect of our lives... and the more like a Democracy it becomes, the more it disregards the political minority and FORCES the will of the majority onto them - this can only end in one of two ways: [1] stepping back from this path or [2] a very bloody civil war. It's a sheer flight of fantasy to presume that a huge segment of the nation will simply abandon all its principles and beliefs and allow the majority to dominate (because unlike the first civil war which was over the singular immoral act of slavery - opposed even by half the founders, and designed by the founders to eventually dissappear, this rising national Democracy in the US eventually will force every political minority to cave to the will of the majority on all aspects of life)
Oh, and before some idiot posts links to famous politicians on both sides of the aisle praising "democracy", be fore-warned that those of us who are educated know you are going out-of-context - It was the tradition in the West, particularly during WWII and the Cold War to refer to "representative governments where individual citizens have the right to vote and freely express their opinions" as "democracies" (in contrast to the various forms of oppressive regimes around the globe) as a form of verbal short-hand.
Universities are corporations - and I know from watching the "Occupy" movement and reading HuffPo that "corporations are evil and should not have any rights of coprorate personhood" that would allow them to do things people can legally do (like own patents)
Ha.
It's MY opinion that public universities should be banned from owning any "IP" - the taxpayers funded it, so they should have it - in the public domain with an MIT-style non-viral license.
The situation is different for private universities where the public has not been forced to contribute at gunpoint (if you don't pay your taxes, eventually the IRS will point guns at you while they take your stuff or toss you in jail - and they'll KILL you if you resist). Most private universities in the US, however, do not make significant funds from patents. In fact, modern tuition costs have ballooned so much that many schools have such huge endowments that they could stop charging ANY tuition and they'd still get richer every year just off the invested funds they already have accumulated; many of the most-famous schools crossed that line over a decade ago. The ballooning tuition rates were enabled by the (artificial) removal of a basic law of economics (the limit of "what the buyer can afford") tht occurred when government made nearly unlimited loans available to nearly all college kids
"but in the past Dems were less guilty of this"
Have you READ any US History?!?!?!?
I Love this country, and historically most average Americans have been as decent as anybody (better than most, I'd argue from my admittedly biased viewpoint) in the context of the times into which each generation was born.... BUT every political party in the US has fallen to some of the most outrageous corruption at some point when it had enough political power to feel comfortable. The Democrats were corrupt-on-steroids in the late 1980s - they'd had a death-grip on their huge uninterrupted majority control of congress for nearly 40 years and were astoniching in their arrogance. They were using the US House Post Office to launder money and traffic cocaine!!!! (that's how un-worried about their opposition and their friends in the press they were).
The only way to limit political corruption is to limit politics by limiting government. ANY attempt to limit corruption by writing laws, fails because the people whose corruption you are attempting to limit are the ones who [1] write the "reforms" [2] enforce the "reforms" and [3] appoint the judges that rule on the enforcement. A further problem is that the actual enforcers are not only employed by, managed by, and accountable to the very politicians you are trying to limit, but they are also always under-funded compared to the people on the outside who are funded by the wealthy businesses and selected by the clever businessmen they serve. Does ANYBODY here seriously expect that Obama's Atty Gen (Eric Holder) will every prosecute ANYBODY in Obama's IRS (over the TEA party matters, one of which is a well-documented felony) or at the ATF (over the "Fast & Furious" gun-running program) or any of the other dozen scandals? The Nixon administration will probably go down in history as the last one to cooperate in its own prosecution. EVERYBODY in all parties learned a big lesson in the Clinton years: if your party sticks together, the other party cannot use the law to stop you, even if you boldly violate federal laws right in front of a live video camera while trying to get away with violating another federal law you yourself signed into effect and wielded against other people.
This is Slashdot where all corporations are evil and should be denied corporate personhood
Not every corporation is evil, but most of them are. As individuals they would be sociopaths. I don't consider the encouragement of sociopathic behavior to be a particularly good idea. Corporate personhood should be abolished. Oh and I'm a Libertarian.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Whoever modded that off-topic is a fucking idiot, then. If it's topical for the story, it's topical, especially if there's obviously a good faith effort to be topical to the post thread.
Microsoft Word is more expensive than an impulse buy. Is the grammar checker in any of the free software competitors to Word any good? And if so, which?
According to opensecrets.org Patrick Leahy -D(umbass) took $572,000 from Lawyers and Law Firms in 2014 alone. In his career from 1989 - 2014, he's taken $1.5 million. The United States of America: best government money can buy.
> because one of their biggest financial pillars is the trial lawyers
Only a small minority of lawyers are even allowed to handle these cases.
So using lawyers in general as some kind of bogeyman here shows an extreme level of ignorance and/or an extreme level of contempt for the electorate.
Only the "nerd" contingent of the bar is even allowed to apply for the kind of credential that allows one to practice in this area.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
New Yorkers displaced to Vermont? They must all be terribly miserable. They whine about ending up in a city like Boston. Being in Vermont must be like living on the moon for them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Go to https://mayone.us/ and read a little bit. The video explaining it is just 4 minutes long ...
Donate if you can, and do spread the word anyway.
As he says, it's a little bit of a moonshot but we need to try it!
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Seems likely. His motivation is pretty obvious.
$3.7 million (the majority) of Reid's campaign contributions from 2009-present are from Lawyers/Law Firms.
Source:
https://www.opensecrets.org/po...
He wasn't using them as boogeymen, he was just stating the facts outlined in this article, and supplementing them with relevant info.
So you're saying trial lawyers did well in school, or are well connected, the creme de la creme and the summa cum laude-- so what?
As a long-term Vermont resident I've been able to observe Leahy's behavior over the years. Between his stances on IP, his name gracing my digital forensics lab alongside our criminal federal agencies, and bullshit like this I'm pretty confident in saying this:
Fuck Patrick Leahy
(that drunk bastard)
The State of Choice for retired Generals, Diplomats and those in Witness Protection to reside under the radar:)
resist propaganda
So using lawyers in general as some kind of bogeyman here shows an extreme level of ignorance and/or an extreme level of contempt for the electorate.
The patent system is riddled with problems involving legal ethics, as is the whole US legal system - both points that have been discussed at length in previous Slashdot discussions and are well established by now.
It's not an accident that the US is known as the Land of the Lawsuit, nor is it insignificant that a number of recent new laws -- laws written by lawyers on legislative staffs, working for politicians who are often themselves lawyers (and can receive "campaign contributions" from organizations representing the legal profession), laws currently being upheld by lawyers in judicial positions -- were hundreds or even thousands of pages in length.
Only a lawyer could like something that complex, but that's the point. The US legal profession thoroughly understands how to manipulate the legal system to create long term demand for the services of its members. They should be skilled at this -- after all, they've been working the system this way for a long, long time.
The last thing the US legal profession wants is any scrutiny of the legal ethics issues in ANY area of law, for fear it will spill over into the rest of the legal system and the public will start demanding (much needed and long overdue) reform on a massive scale.
The problem here is much like the US medical profession's attitude towards health care reform. For those deeply entrenched in the current (broken) systems, there's to much money to be made to do the ethically and morally right thing.
Fortunately for the legal profession, most legislators are themselves legal professionals, so it's easy to squash the attempts at reform of the legal system (an advantage the doctor's don't have).
This is a good thing.
We need to actually change patent law to make it simpler and to avoid handing out patents for which there is prior art. We need legislation that addresses prior art, not something that puts a new, purposefully vague, legal term into play (patent troll).