Slashdot Mirror
How Lobby Groups Rejected the Canadian Government's Plan To Combat Patent Trolls
An anonymous reader writes Michael Geist reports
that according to documents
recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, the Canadian
government quietly proposed a series
of reforms to combat patent trolls including new prohibitions
on demand letters, powers to the courts to stop patent forum
shopping, and giving competition authorities the ability to deal
with patent troll anti-competitive activity. The problem? Business
lobby groups warned against the "unintended consequences" of patent
reforms.
Of course established businesses want to keep the current patent situation - they're already big enough to fight patent trolls if they want to.
They want those patent trolls around to eat smaller competition that can't afford the fight.
The anti-troll measures described in TFA don't sounds to me like they would be particularly effective for most cases. Patent trolls seek out people for whom legal representation is likely to cost as much as a settlement, since those people don't have lawyers on staff and patents are a complicated and specialized field. What the measures would do is provide more opportunities for a lawyer to contest the patent letter. Since the typical targets tend to settle solely to avoid having to pay a lawyer, this will not help. What needs to happen instead is a mandatory notification in the demand letter of certain pieces of evidence which will automatically avoid patent fees if produced. I'm talking known prior art or existing license agreements, as well as other categories of potentially more complicated evidence to be created. Patent trolls thrive on the over-complication in the law, so the solution to them is to create short circuits to their lawsuits that protect 80% of the innocent without retaining a lawyer.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
The pdf linked in the article mentions a few points. The following is my understanding of what they said. It doesn't represent my opinion.
The commenters generally agreed that patent trolling isn't currently a big problem in Canada. Canadian companies are affected more by US trolls, because the Canadian system already handles it pretty well. Therefore "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Any change will have good and bad consequences, and Canada doesn't need much good consequences.
Universities were given as an example of institutions which do real, valuable research and development, but don't manufacture products. They license their technology, so they are non-practicing entities. How do you legally distinguish a research institution and a company who licenses the results of that work vs a troll?
I happen to know that the vast majority of trolling is done by four companies. Hundreds of thousands of people have patents. The challenge is to target those four needles in a very large haystack. When you're targeting a needle in a haystack, and want to destroy the needle (troll) without harming the hay (inventors etc) you want to use precision tools.