Engine Advocacy, a group for technological entrepreneurs (or in slightly less sympathetic words, a lobby group for startups), has published a website, fixpatents.com, that promotes anti-patent troll reform.
The website includes a humorous Youtube video, which I've embedded above. I think the pleasing, funny, and easy-to-understand video makes their argument more effective. The video describes, in simple terms, software patents and them being exploited by an emerging patent troll business model. For example, it suggests that software patents can be overly broad and that trolls prey on vulnerable end users. I agree with both ideas, and talked about them in my last posts on Startups and patent trolls:
Patent trolls target smaller companies more than larger ones. Smaller companies lose more in time, money, and operational impact relative to their size. Startups do not have the financial and legal resources available to larger companies. They prefer settling, to the uncertainty and expense of the courts, even if a ruling would likely be favorable.
and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International:
Software patents are a tricky issue. A study from the Government Accountability Office found that a disproportionate share of patent cases concern software patents. James Bessen claimed that this is because software is more likely to have fuzzy boundaries and particularly prone to broad and vague patents. He also claimed that "the patent troll crisis is really a software patent problem".
Non-practicing entities are portrayed as an epidemic, with statistics like them accounting for two-thirds of new patent suits and costing defendants $1 trillion. I'm not sure if the "trillion" number is realistic, but as we've learned in class with the NTP vs. RIM case, the settlements while high, pale in comparison to the (potential) lost revenues associated with injunctions and delayed product development.
The Innovation Act passed in the House last December, but still needs to pass in the Senate.
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