Is there hope for US patent reform?
US patent and trademark law is clearly out of step with technological developments. A fight is about to develop in the US Congress over attempts to reform the patent mess. Entrenched vested interests and patent trolls are trying to block reform. Ars Technica has an account of the situation:
Over 50 years after its last major overhaul, there’s a widespread sense that the US patent system has gone off the rails. The US Patent and Trademark office sits on a backlog of over a million patent applications, with applicants facing an average wait of three years for a decision. Those long lines don’t appear to have prevented the granting of many patents of dubious quality—a problem exacerbated by the explosion of lawsuits by “Non-Practicing Entities” (affectionately known as patent trolls), which, in recent years, have come to account for more than 10 percent of all patent litigation.
The present patent situation is not only ludicrous but economically damaging. Ars Technica notes:
Stanford legal scholar Brian Love has argued that the current “overcompensation” of patent holders—in essence, assigning them damages for value not attributable to their inventions—”results in socially undesirable consequences such as reduced incentives for investment in beneficial technology, increased risk of royalty stacking, and increased incentive for patent trolling.” The failure to carefully apportion patent vale, Love writes, creates deadweight economic losses by increasing the risk associated with the deployment of new products; that risk is out of proportion to the genuine value of the innovation created by higher returns to patent holders.
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