Finally, a Bill To End Patent Trolling 162
First time accepted submitter jellie writes "According to Ars Technica, a new bill introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has received bipartisan support and has a real chance of passing. In a press call, lawyers from the CCIA, EFF, and Public Knowledge had universal praise for the bill, which is called the Innovation Act of 2013. The EFF has a short summary of the good and bad parts of an earlier draft of the bill. The bill will require patent holders who are filing a suit to identify the specific products and claims which are being infringed, require the loser in a suit to pay attorney's fees and costs, and force trolls to reveal anyone who has a 'financial interest' in the case, making them possibly liable for damages."
Contact your rep here (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.house.gov/representatives/ [house.gov]
Re:Good start, but... (Score:5, Informative)
A NPE can still file suit. It's just they have to bring suit over a specific infringing product and be capable of identifying said product. Do you recall a slashdot story not too long ago about a patent troll that carpet bombed small businesses with letters asking if they used a printer with a scanning feature that would use a network to send a PDF file to be email out? That would not be a valid lawsuit under the law as the troll would not be able to identify a specific product in use by the businesses they are writing letters to.
Re:Why should not the loser always pay? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure about the loser paying when the loser is the defendant. That means you can pay arbitrarily high fees to a lawyer to sue someone as long as you think you'll win.
German method: Plaintiff asks for money, defendant offers money (less or possibly zero). Court sets cost according the the value that is in argument (the difference). That's the fees that the lawyers get! Then if defendant is ordered to pay what he offered to pay anyway, he has won the case. If its more, the percentage he is ordered to pay is the percentage of the lawyers that he pays.
Example: You ask for $2.1 million. I offer $100,000. The court orders me to pay $120,000. We argued about two million. I was ordered to pay $20,000 = one percent beyond what I offered to pay anyway. I pay one percent of my lawyers and your lawyers, you pay 99%. And the lawyers get paid at the fixed "$2,000,000 rate" which is some small percentage of these two million.
Re:Still Bad Patents (Score:4, Informative)
The patent office is doing their job. They are charged with recording and maintaining records of patents. When you file, you swear, under oath, that the patent you are filing does not already exist and is not already in prior practice. The people who file patents honestly do patent searches (that is why the lawyers get the big bucks) before they file the patent.
If you file a patent of something that already exists or has already been patented, you are expected to be taken to court to have your patent invalidated. The rules are setup in a way that the courts can deal with patent issues, not a government bureaucrat sitting in an office.
But, that is how the system was setup and how the office is charged in running.
I believe you may be confused, or may be referring to another country, such as Hong Kong. Basically, there are two systems for patents. The first is a registration-only system in which the patent office does nothing other than "record and maintain records". Hong Kong has this. Australia also has invention registrations that are separate from patents, and are merely recorded.
The second is an examination system in which the patent office does a full search and examination of the patent application, typically (around 90% of the time in the US) rejecting the patent application initially, and leaving it to the inventor to amend and narrow the claims in response before the patent is finally allowed. The "government bureaucrats sitting in an office" in these systems are scientists and engineers. Frequently in these systems, the patent attorney does not do prior art searches, because the patent examiner is going to do his or her own search anyway and why would he or she accept ours?
This is not to say that the examination systems are perfect, but just that the office is doing more than just recording and maintaining records.