Patent infringer lobby pushes Trump Transition Team Patent infringer lobby pushes Trump Transition Team to aggressively pursue patent reform
By Gene Quinn
December 5, 2016
Several weeks ago Internet Association President Michael Beckerman sent a letter to President Elect Donald Trump and the Trump Transition Team. The Internet Association ismade up of companies that are by and large openly hostile to the U.S. patent system and innovators. The letter touched upon issues ranging from copyright safe harbors under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to recommended reforms to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to open access to the Internet and, of course, patent reform. I will confine my comments (see below) to the Internet Association’s patent reform commentary.
With this in mind I thought the best way to provide my thoughts and comments would be in the format of comments from the peanut gallery, or perhaps as a patent law equivalent to Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I do from time to time. In order to differentiate my thoughts/comments from comments of the Internet Association, my comments are italicized, colored, indented and tagged with the IPWatchdog logo. I will also focus my comments on one paragraph in particular.
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IA LETTER: Patent law remains an area of intense litigation and uncertainty due to entities often referred to as patent trolls, which cost our economy tens of billions of dollars per year. These entities incite high-cost, baseless litigation, which diverts resources from productive business research and development.
MY TAKE: Not that it should come as any surprise to anyone who follows the patent reform debate, but what the Internet Association says here is simply false. First, just recently the Federal Trade Commission released its much anticipated report on Patent Assertion Entities and concluded: “In the Commission’s view, a label like ‘patent troll’ is unhelpful because it invites pre-judgment about the societal impact of patent assertion activity without an understand of the underlying business model that fuels such activity.” Second, it is a complete lie that patent owners cost the economy tens of billions of dollars per year. This figure has been thoroughly and completely debunked, yet the infringer lobby that prides itself on efficient infringement (i.e., stealing rights without paying for them) continues to use figures that even the authors of the original study no longer support. In a nutshell, the way the “billions of dollars” estimate is erroneously arrived as it by conflating “costs” with “transfers.” The acquisition of rights through a license is not an economic cost as if it were a zero sum game, and neither is the payment of damages for having chosen to trample the rights of the property owner in the first place. If the Internet Association is reduced to relying on name-calling (which even the FTC says is unhelpful) and bogus statistics without any economic justification, obviously their case for reform is very weak — which it is.
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https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016/12/05/patent-infringer-lobby-trump-patent-reform/id=74869/