14 DAY TRIAL // Patent trolls are going to have a harder time extracting money from tech companies in the future after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new patent reform law and cleared it to go on the Senate's floor for voting.
The new bill will not only benefit Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle, but business in all kinds of markets, from bio-tech to medical research.
Passing with a vote of 16 to 4, the patent reform bill aims to protect the US legal system from being abused by companies that behave like blackmailers, and not as top innovators in their fields.
The end of customer harassment with patent-related lawsuits
The new bill, if passed, will prevent ludicrous lawsuits where a customer is sued for using technology for which he paid for, and the manufacturing company should be responsible.
An example would be if Google were being sued for using technology bought from Oracle, for which Oracle didn't own the patent. The new law will block patent trolls from going after customers, and restrict their law to the companies that have manufactured a product without proper patents.
Other cases which the new bill will eliminate include situations where the patent covers basic technology.
An example from the real world of outrageous lawsuits would be when Personal Audio, a company that held a silly patent which should have never been given to them, tried to sue comedian Adam Carolla for a few million dollars.
Their original patent covered the idea of syndicating magazine articles online and managed to cover (in their eyes) technologies like RSS and podcasting which offered media content in a "timeline" format.
This patent was eventually revoked after a serious campaign from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but that didn't stop the company from using the patent to extract money from various online publishers.
Patent trolls will have a hard time shaking down companies for cash
While patents were initially created with the sole purpose of rewarding inventors, patent trolls have turned this whole system on its head, and thanks to a series of questionable tactics, future innovators will have to suffer.
The upcoming patent legislation also outlaws a series of their most known blackmailing stratagems, like fee shifting, demand letters, pleadings, and discovery standards.
While this will make it harder for patent trolls to exploit the US judiciary system, the new bill also makes it very hard for smaller patent holders to protect their innovations.
Apparently, this is a risk which the Senate is willing to take to protect its legal system, and the real core of the debate that's going to take place on the Senate floor in the upcoming weeks.