CCIA is hosting an important event on Thursday, February 28th entitled “How Patent Trolls are Harming Innovation.” The event will take place in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and will feature six prominent panelist offering different but harmonious opinions on the current state of the 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. environment:
- Julie Samuels, Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents, Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Alan Schoenbaum, Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Rackspace
- Tim Sparapani, Vice President of Law, Policy and Government Relations, Application Developers Alliance
- Edward Goodmann, Policy and Research Manager, Engine Advocacy
- Seth Brown, Head of Litigation, LivingSocial
- Erik Lieberman, Regulatory Counsel, Food Marketing Institute
This is a critically important event for anyone immersed in the high-tech competition, regulatory or policy-making discussion. The panelists will discuss the contours of the patent assertion entity problem with an emphasis on identifying the true nature of the problem and crafting meaningful, practical solutions.
During the course of the event the panelists will explain the history of software patents and how the rise of PAEs occurred; the destructive effect on start-ups; the real-life impact on companies that do not traditionally operate in the high-tech space and the precise nature of how the current patent system often has the paradoxical effect of incentivizing litigation instead of innovation.
PAEs are a concern for a multitude of companies, trade associations, and policy-makers. For those in the competition and antitrust arena this event is an absolutely vital opportunity to learn about the problem and start thinking about ways that we can craft solutions.
