September 18, 2013
Revenge can be sweet, especially against patent trolls.
Payback can be slow – painfully slow – in coming, but thankfully, at last, it does seem to be showing signs of finally arriving and hitting some most unsavory types – patent trolls – squarely in the nether regions.
I’ve already waxed lyrical here about trolls and what needs to be done to up the fight in tackling this scourge.
Here, let me give you a quick review of what needs to be done:
- Patent use to be limited – a ban on claims for a term preceding their acquisition;
- Mandatory compensation of a defendant’s expenses if a lawsuit against it is either defeated in court or withdrawn;
- A ban on patent aggregators bringing lawsuits;
- An increase in the required detail and accuracy of patent descriptions, and mandatory technical expert examinations;
- The main thing: not for ideas to be patented, but their concrete practical application.
Sometimes it seems like US legislators read my blog! Finally, something is getting done – and not just anywhere, but in the state of Vermont, where the first anti-troll law has come into effect!
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this law, but what I like most in it is that now a defendant company can demand from a patent troll reimbursement of all its legal costs if it manages to prove that the troll acted not in good faith.