The Evilness of Patent Trolls
In order the thwart the evilness of Patent Trolls, the U. S. Patent office must implore new efforts into ending lackadaisical patent granting, Legislation and Judicial efforts must be tightened in order to lessen the financial appeal of trolling, and public industries must take the initiative by solving this problem with their own means by placing basic technological patents into the public domain. The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office is under great financial distress and must be aided in order to provide a first line of defense in the war against patent trolls.
Through the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office too many patents are being granted that are extremely broad in scope or that can be explained as a common sense idea (Luman). The issue with a broadly drafted patent is that Patent Trolls can use a broad patent to apply it to many different inventions, therefore increasing the range of infringement cases. Currently, there are 3,000 examiners that work for the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office that are attempting to rule on the issue of a patent to 350,000 applications filed each year (Luman).
Due to the sheer volume of nearly 117 patent applications for each examiner, a measly 17-25 hours are being spent on each potential patent. Because of the lack of resources and time in order to make a proper decision on whether a patent should be approved, in recent years 85 percent to 95 percent of all patents filed were granted (Luman). Clearly, the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office should be appropriated more funds in order to deal with the escalating number of applications each year.
Money spent ensuring quality patents are issued will greatly decrease the money spent on litigation log jamming our court system. However, despite an attempt from the House of Representatives in 2003 to appropriate more funds, the act failed in the Senate leaving the U. S. Patent and Trademark office overworked and underfunded. Congress and the Supreme Court must take a more appropriate stance against firms that purchase patents from inventors and other companies with no intention of using the patent for any reason other than suing another entity or patent infringement. This has become known as a non-practicing-entity. These non-practicing-entities attempt to sue a company for patent infringement and having the courts issue an injunction stopping manufacturing of a product. Then the patent holding troll company can extort outrageous licensing fees from the producing company in order to continue the manufacture of a product. (Licensing Complimentary Products) This was most infamously displayed in NTP, inc V.
Research in Motion, Ltd. In 2006 when NTP, inc (a non-practicing-entity) accused Research in Motion, the makers of Blackberry, of infringing upon several of their patents in reference to their email retrieval system. NTP sought and was consequently awarded a permanent Injunction against Research in Motion which then was forced to pay royalties in the amount of 612. 5 million dollars in order to continue to use NTP’s patents. This, unfortunately, has been happening all too often.
The Federal Circuit Courts trend of automatically granting injunctions whenever a patent is infringed upon is allowing trolls free reign in which to extort money from corporate defendants. However, Congress has been slow in pushing through patent reform bills that would only allow courts to issue injunctions to company’s patents that actually practice within the same core business sector. However, due to a recent court decision against eBay,
