14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of weeks ago, the House of Representatives introduced a bill meant to curtail the worst of the activities of patent trolls, but people were divided on it, so now a second one has been put forward.
This seems to be one of those occasions where a party introduced a motion it knows will be rejected, just so the second proposal will be considered reasonable in comparison, even though it would have probably caused controversy of its own if it came out from the start.
This is one case, however, where we can't really begrudge the House of Representatives on this move, assuming it is what happened.
After all, patent trolls aren't something you can easily empathize with, unless you're one yourself.
Patent trolls are companies that don't produce anything, but file and buy patents, which they then sue other companies over. Basically, they live off financial settlements reached after such legal actions.
The House of Representatives (which represents half the US Congress), ironically enough, didn't get the first bill passed because, while it was a bit radical in some areas, in others it wasn't harsh enough.
Reformers wanted to allow the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute patent holders who send out misleading threat letters. Now that the House has revised the bill to allow that, people seem to be more accepting of it.
Seeing as how some patent owners have sent out thousands of letters to small businesses in the past few years, asking for patent royalties, lots of people in congress are annoyed.
They want to slap down those “bottom feeders,” as they were denounced in a Senate subcommittee not long ago.
One stipulation was dropped out of the bill too, though, namely the expansion of the CBM patent review (covered business method).
Some wanted to lower the money needed to challenge patents from $1million - $5 million to $100,000 (€740M - €3,70M to €75,000), but tech companies with large patent collections (IBM, Microsoft) resisted this, even as many other Internet companies supported it.
All in all, the bill is becoming an exercise in compromises, and it hasn't finished causing strife since some democrats feel that wide-ranging changes to the litigation system should be avoided.