One Year Since The Innovation Act, And Still No Patent Reform

from the time-to-push-harder dept

Post sponsored by

CEA

One year ago this week, the House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan patent reform legislation — the Innovation Act — to stop patent trolls from suing innovators, collecting billions, costing jobs and undermining economic growth. The Senate failed to act, but there’s no reason this bipartisan bill should not become law.

Contact your U.S. Senator and ask them to pass patent litigation reform! »

What is a patent troll? Think of a school bully.

Much like a kid handing over his lunch money to a bully, patent trolls are extortionists who sue small companies for money. Patent trolls do not create jobs or products, but instead get rich by suing or threatening litigation to extract licensing fees from businesses and tech entrepreneurs.

In 2011 the founder of TMSOFT, Todd Moore became acquainted with patent trolls when Lodsys, a patent holding company aka patent troll, sued Moore over the "White Noise” mobile app he developed.  The patent troll letter said Moore was in violation of 4 of their patents. Lodsys doesn’t even produce apps or anything for that matter.

Small business owners like Moore aren’t the only victims of patent trolls. Patent extortionist Lodsys went ahead and also sued Walt Disney Company over apps.

Big or small, no one is safe from patent trolls. UNLESS Congress takes action and changes our laws. Patent trolls bleed $80 billion a year from the U.S. economy, that’s 1.5 billion a week!

The House has taken action, now it is up to the Senate.


The Innovation Movement, sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association, unites those who believe innovation is critical to American global leadership and economic growth. The Innovation Movement uses grassroots advocacy tools to support smart public policies, like patent litigation reform, that foster startups and innovation. To learn more about the Innovation Movement’s work fighting patent trolls, visit trollticker.com, follow on Twitter @imovement and like Innovation Movement on Facebook.

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Filed Under: innovation act, patent reform, patents, sponsored post


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 Dec 2014 @ 12:14pm

    Absolutely...let's pass even more legislation that is overbroad and rapidly being overtaken by events (i.e., case law).

    The presence of this article and others like it dealing with advocacy for specific legislative initiatives is leading me to believe that perhaps the site is becoming more a PAC/Advocacy Group and less a journalistic endeavor.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      WDS (profile), 1 Dec 2014 @ 12:30pm

      Re:

      So exactly how do you reform laws without rewriting them, and passing the new law?

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 1 Dec 2014 @ 1:23pm

        Re: Re:

        If you were aware of case law developments you would realize that much of what the proposed legislation purports to reform has been OBE. As for procedural matters such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, what is contained in the House bill subsumes far more in its grasp than just so-called "trolls", "NPEs", etc.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

        • identicon
          espen, 1 Dec 2014 @ 10:42pm

          Re: Re: Re:

          Care to share some specific information on the cases you are referring to instead of patronizing the people posting here? It would be nice for all of us to know what you're talking about.

          link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Altaree, 1 Dec 2014 @ 12:35pm

    Need more content less pitch.

    Can the sponsored articles at least pretend to have content. This was almost all pitch.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Leigh Beadon (profile), 1 Dec 2014 @ 12:41pm

      Re: Need more content less pitch.

      CEA is also sponsoring some of our regular coverage of patent troll issues, and that will be starting this week as well. We think this is a good campaign that our readers will be interested in so we're highlighting it -- but the majority of the sponsorship covers normal Techdirt content, so stay tuned

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    TheResidentSkeptic (profile), 2 Dec 2014 @ 7:32am

    The Government can NOT stop it.

    The government is made up mostly of lawyers. Who are NOT going to pass any laws preventing other lawyers from making massive amounts of money so they can make massive campaign contributions to the lawyers still in the government, or provide cushy high-paying jobs to those who leave government service.

    Only Shakespeare's approach will ever be able to fix this.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    staff, 2 Dec 2014 @ 1:25pm

    more dissembling by thieves

    'the Innovation Act — to stop patent trolls from suing innovators'

    Stop the dissembling. He who owns the patent is the innovator. Those who use without permission of the inventor are thieves. This little charade has been going on in America since at least the age of the telegraph.

    Just because they call it “reform” doesn’t mean it is.

    http://www.npr.org/2013/11/06/243022966/secret-persuasion-how-big-campaign-donors-stay-anonymous
    h ttp://www.law360.com/articles/561199/justices-should-back-off-patent-eligibility-michel-says

    “paten t reform”…America Invents Act, vers 1.0, 2.0, 3.0…

    “This is not a patent reform bill” Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) complained,
    despite other democrats praising the overhaul. “This is a big
    corporation patent giveaway that tramples on the right of small
    inventors.”

    Senator Cantwell is right. All these bills do is legalize theft. Just because they call it “reform” doesn’t mean it is. The paid puppets of banks, huge multinationals and China continue to brain wash and bankrupt America. If you tell a lie often enough and can dupe others to repeat that lie, eventually it is accepted as fact. As Mark Twain said, 'truth is not hard to kill, and (that) a lie well told is immortal'. Those who use the amorphous phrase 'patent troll' expose themselves as thieves, duped, or doped and perpetuate the lie.

    They should have called these bills the America STOPS Inventing Act or ASIA, because that’s where they’re sending all our jobs. These changes are killing our small and startup firms and the jobs they would have created. The present bill (vers 1, 2, 3, etc) is nothing less than another giveaway for huge multinationals and China and an off shoring job killing nightmare for America. Even the leading patent expert in China has stated these bills will help them steal our inventions.

    Patent reform is a fraud on America. These bills will not do what they claim they will. What they will do is help large multinational corporations maintain their monopolies by robbing and destroying their small entity and startup competitors (so it will do exactly what they paid for) and with them the jobs they would have created. For the last several years now they have been ransacking and looting small entities taking everything they can carry. They have already damaged the US patent system so that property rights are teetering on lawlessness. These bills will only make it harder and more expensive for small firms to get and enforce their patents. Without patents we cant get funded. In this way large firms are able to play king of the hill and keep their small competitors from reaching the top as they have. Yet small entities create the lion’s share of new jobs. According to recent studies by the Kauffman Foundation and economists at the U.S. Census Bureau, “startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They’re the only thing.” Meanwhile, the large multinationals ship more and more jobs overseas. These bills are a wholesale destroyer of American jobs.

    It’s about property rights and jobs. When government fails to uniformly and justly enforce property rights they contribute to the wealth and the power of the well placed few, suppress the economic potential of the rest, support giant monopolies that enslave and impoverish the public, and commandeer the government.

    Those wishing to help fight big business giveaways and set America on a course for sustainable prosperity, not large corporation lobbied poverty, should contact us as below and join the fight as we are building a network of inventors and other stakeholders to lobby Congress to restore property rights for all patent owners -large and small, and the jobs they bring.

    for a different/opposing view on patent reform, please see…
    http://truereform.piausa.org/default.html
    http://piausa.wordpress.com/
    http://humanevents.com/20 14/10/22/depriving-property-rights-is-patently-offensive/
    http://townhall.com/columnists/eriktelford/ 2014/10/22/google-leverages-patent-reform-for-crony-ends-n1908760
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/paten t-reform-like-most-reforms-in-the-end-benefits-the-biggest-guys-with-the-best-lobbyists/article/2524 033

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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