John Oliver has covered an impressive amount of tech policy issues on his weekly HBO show Last Week Tonight, the National Journal points out, and he continued this last night, discussing patents and patent reform.
Oliver touched on many issues that are familiar to Patent Progress readers: abstract patents and patent quality, trolls suing end users, shell companies, the Eastern District of Texas, and the Innovation Act.
Oliver’s segment provided a lot of useful data on 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. problem. We’ve compiled some of the most significant data points from the segment, with links to sources:
- Of the 4,700 patent lawsuits filed in 2012, 3000 were from patent trolls. (Bloomberg)
- During the last 2 years, the number of lawsuits brought by patent trolls has nearly tripled. (White House)
- Research shows this type of litigation has cost investors an estimated half a trillion dollars since 1990. (New York Times)
- Almost 90% of cases with patent trolls are settled. (Georgetown Law Journal)
- It costs between $2 and 5 million to defend a patent suit. (News 4 San Antonio interview of Rackspace’s Alan Schoenbaum)
- A quarter of all patent cases are filed in Marshall, Texas. (Al Jazeera)
One particularly important point John Oliver made was when he explained how 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. epidemic is tied to patent quality, and the PTO issuing poor quality patents:
And that is the seed of our current problems, because if a 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. can get a vaguely defined software patentA generalized term referring to patents whose subject matter extends to computer-implemented code, which have been the subject of great controversy, including but not limited to how they interact with open source software. Although software patents are often denigrated, there is no accepted definition. However, there are a variety of methods for identifying software patents for empirical analysis. See Bessen, A they can demand payment from anything that fits that description.
The whole 11 minute video is worth watching! And you can take action to tell your Congressmen to #fixpatents here.
