| jeremy |
05-12-2015 12:51 PM |
Senate’s PATENT Act is a Big Win for Startups
Quote:
Today, Sens. Grassley, Leahy, Cornyn, Schumer, Lee, Hatch and Klobuchar introduced the PATENT Act, an important piece of legislation targeting a serious patent troll problem. Engine is proud to support that bill.
The PATENT Act, and the Innovation Act, its House counterpart, are effective because they are comprehensive in scope. Each contains a package of incentives that, taken together, insert balance back into patent litigation, giving troll targets the tools to fight back and ensuring that patent holders act responsibly. Importantly, they are carefully crafted to ensure that a patent holder with a high-quality patent and a legitimate claim of infringement will face no barriers to making that claim.
To understand the way these bills work, you have to understand a bit about the patent troll problem. Patent trolls are primarily armed with two weapons: low-quality, impossible-to-understand patents and the outrageous costs of patent litigation, which can easily cost a defendant well into the millions of dollars. So imagine you are a small startup, cash-strapped and hungry, and you get a patent demand from a company you’ve never heard of, claiming it owns some seemingly basic technology. (This really happens. Often. See here, here, here, and here, for example.) Your choices are: hire a lawyer and spend valuable time dealing with the problem or pay the troll to go away, usually for a sum far smaller than what it would cost to hire that lawyer or go to court.
The good news is that the Supreme Court has been busy trying to fix the problem of low-quality patents. The bad news is that we still have a long way to go. Patent litigation remains outrageously expensive and one-sided, giving a patent owner who is willing to take advantage of loopholes in the system the ability to run roughshod over defendants.
This is where Congress, and specifically today’s introduction of the PATENT Act, comes in. Its provisions help right the imbalance in patent litigation through a series of reforms:
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--jeremy |
