Who Helped Kill Patent Troll Reform In the Senate 157
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."'"
Oh noe's (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Your system of government killed it (Score:3, Insightful)
Your system of government is corrupt and out of control.
Asking for names is not seeing the forest for the trees.
Lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as lawyers are the majority of legislators you'll never see real patent *or* torte reform. End of story.
As it should be (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kudos (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to what? Some Scientologist teatard [wikipedia.org]? No thanks.
No. As opposed to Alex Miller, Eduardo Hamilton, or Carlo Poliak [wikipedia.org]
I must say, though, it was quite amusing that "None of these" got 10% of the vote.
Supporters of the plan accuse... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Supporters of the plan accuse... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Universities seem like part of the problem. They take public funds to pay for research and patent the results. If my tax dollars are paying for research, I want to share in the rewards rather than having the profits privatized to pay for some litigious university IP department.
Re: Your system of government killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, your comment is moronic, because it implies that the right thing to do is cut down the tree, by which I assume you mean destroy what's left of the democracy. What do you think will arise in its place? Something better? Read your fucking history. The right thing to do is take this seriously and get active. It's worked in the past, and it will work again. Burning down the house is not the right way to solve this problem.
Re:Supporters of the plan accuse... (Score:5, Insightful)
Research is not the same as patents. The race to earn patents as a way of funding University research is corrupting University research by making Universities into unpaid R&D divisions for the private sector. That's a big part of the reason you don't have things like Bell Labs any more; they've been outsourced so that governments pay for a lot of the infrastructure by paying for the Unviersity.
It's not Universities that are opposed to fixing the patent system. It's the people in Universities right now who make their money by being invested in the current corrupt patent system. Universities, as they should be, would not be serving as subsidised corporate R&D and filing patents.
Re:Kudos (Score:1, Insightful)
SImple. There's a D by his name. All D's are victims when their actions don't jibe with the predominant Millennial view of them being the fearless, freedom-loving, progressive warriors for social justice.
Re:As it should be (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh noe's (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be cool if the companies suypporting this bill sent about about 20,000 demand letters to Vermont and Nevada companies and then started prosecuting on them. Should be easy since overly broad patents are a dime a dozen. Then maybe Leahy and Reid will get the message before their constituents break their doors down.
Re: Your system of government killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd call American democracy a pretty good prototype of the real thing.
But its just a prototype, and beta ended loooong ago.
America was NOT created to be a Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Alternatives to Word (Score:2, Insightful)