Congress seeks to quash patent trolls
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Predatory ‘patent trolls’ could soon find it harder to operate in the United States. Legislation to curb frivolous patent lawsuits has regained momentum after lawmakers in the US Senate added a provision to stop university patent holders from being penalized along with the trolls. [...]
Patent trolls are ‘non-practising entities’ that accumulate patents with no intention of turning the inventions into marketable products. Many of these firms exist solely to enforce their patents, threatening other companies with lawsuits if they are not paid handsome licensing fees. The legal strategy is often a low-risk endeavour, because many patent trolls are shell corporations that are only loosely affiliated with larger firms — and so do not have the financial assets that would support large awards to opponents should they lose a suit.
Congress, urged on by lawsuit-weary high-technology companies and the administration of US President Barack Obama, is trying to fight these kinds of trolls. Non-practising entities filed 63% of all US patent-infringement lawsuits in 2014, and cost operating companies an estimated US$12.2 billion in legal fees, settlements and judgments, according to RPX, a consultancy in San Francisco, California. [...]
The US patent office is often criticized for granting patents too readily, resulting in a gnarly — and growing — thicket of patents (see ‘Patent pile-up’). The result is that companies often struggle to discern when they are infringing intellectual property (see Nature 458, 952–953; 2009). A series of court decisions has begun to address the problem, says Nicholson Price, a legal scholar at the University of New Hampshire in Concord. Foremost among them is a Supreme Court decision last year to limit patents on software, which has yielded a steady stream of district-court decisions to invalidate questionable patents (see Nature 507, 410–411; 2014). The patent office has also created a process by which outside parties can challenge recently granted patents without resorting to litigation, which has helped to tighten patent standards (see Nature 472, 149; 2011). [...]
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