People who sue technology companies over patents when they?re really only trying to win big settlements have earned themselves a nickname: patent trolls.
Thanks to the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes Act, or SHIELD Act, their days may be numbered.
The SHIELD Act would require anybody who files a lawsuit related to a computer hardware or software patent to pay his or her opponent?s legal bills if a court finds the lawsuit ?did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding.?
Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio introduced the bill in the House to protect innovators from superfluous lawsuits.
?Patent trolls don?t create new technology and they don?t create American jobs,? said DeFazio in a statement. ?They pad their pockets by buying patents on products they didn?t create and then suing the innovators who did the hard work and created the product.?
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this ?loser pays? system isn?t a revolutionary concept and has long been a part of copyright law in other fields.
Congress has traditionally shied away from stating exactly what a ?software patent? is or if they?re even legal, but the SHIELD Act gives this definition of software patent:
?Any process that could be implemented in a computer regardless of whether a computer is specifically mentioned in the patent? as well as any computer system programmed to carry out such a process, while a computer is defined as an ?electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions.?
The authors of the SHIELD Act, however, were careful to include language confirming that the legislation should not be interpreted to mean that software patents are legal. As Ars Technica pointed out, the issue has been dealt with more directly by the Supreme Court, which has held that patent protection doesn?t apply to many software innovations.
Should patent trolls be required to foot the bill of their legal opponent? Would that reduce the amount of frivolous lawsuits in the technology world? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Denzorr
Article source: http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/BLtdmvofoZY/
Source: http://computer-troopers.com/blogs/?p=8365
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