The momentum for dealing with patent trolls in Congress is nothing short of amazing. Yesterday afternoon, Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) introduced a bipartisan bill in the House to address issues with patent trollAn entity in the business of being infringed — by analogy to the mythological troll that exacted payments from the unwary. Cf. NPE, PAE, PME. See Reitzig and Henkel, Patent Trolls, the Sustainability of ‘Locking-in-to-Extort’ Strategies, and Implications for Innovating Firms. litigation. The bill is H.R. 2639, the Patent Litigation and Innovation Act of 2013.
This bill is noteworthy because it’s the first bill introduced that has end user protections. What I mean by that is that there are provisions to allow manufacturers to step in and basically take over a case against an end user who has been accused of patent infringement based on something they purchased. (There are drafts floating around that have some form of end user protections, but none has been introduced as a bill yet.)
There are some provisions are very close to those in the Patent Abuse Reduction Act (S. 1013) that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced in May, and it actually goes farther than Sen. Cornyn’s bill in slowing down discovery until initial issues can be resolved.
Another very interesting idea in the bill is to treat patent cases more like securities cases in that judges would have to do a review at the end of the case to determine if the attorneys satisfied their obligations to not file frivolous papers with the court.
It’s especially exciting to see more Congresspeople taking up the cause and proposing new solutions. We are definitely looking forward to working with Reps. Farenthold and Jeffries on this bill.
You can Tweet your support below:
[tweetbutton hashtag=’fixpatents’]Thank you Rep @Farenthold and @RepJeffries for taking on patent trolls![/tweetbutton]