Post 7: Patent Trolls -- What's after it?

What’s a patent troll? According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, a patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming us with new ideas. In some cases, the companies buy the patents from unlucky companies and send out threatening letters to those they argue “infringe” their patents to pay a licensing fee, which ranges from thousands of dollars. Surprisingly, many who receive infringement letters choose to pay the licensing fee although they believe their products do not infringe. Why don’t they fight back?

I found the answer from Mercury News, “’Patent trolls’ filing majority of U.S patent lawsuits”. A data found from Patexia shows a sharp increase in patent lawsuits at the end of last year.

Based on a research done by a Californian law professor, Colleen Chien, the majority of U.S patent lawsuits are brought by “patent trolls”. In 2012, abut 61% of patent lawsuits were brought by patent-assertion, comparing with 45% in 2011 and 23 % five years ago.  Many patent demands were settled before reaching the lawsuit.

I think many companies would like to settle the cases since they can’t afford the huge lawsuit cost or they don’s want to waste their time on lawsuit. It seems like a lot of companies have treated patent lawsuits as a business model rather that build their own technology. I can’t judge if that’s right or wrong. Probability that’s why professor Lavian said the patent lawsuit made some lawyers rich. However, I wonder how long they can go before the U.S. government improves the patent law. It has been several years since the first smartphone patents related lawsuit in 2009. I think it’s quite a long time for the patent office to analyze their leak and fix it. Nevertheless, it might be harder for the technology companies that really need to assert their patents.

All in all, I think it’s the time for the patent office to regulate the market.