Pig, lipstick, head, sand, bury.
It's just putting lipstick on the pig that is the USPTO.
I have said it before, but treating the symptoms is not as effective treating the disease.
The US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee has voted 33-5 to send a bill to the full House that aims to stop abusive patent lawsuits and so-called patent trolls. The panel approved the measure yesterday that particularly hopes to put a stop to patent-holding firms whose only purpose is to aggressively pursue …
The USPTO is certainly one of the problems, but not the only one.
We have patent trolls that write to companies telling them they are violating one of their patents, but won't tell them which one. They ask for a licence to cover all the patents in their portfolio, and if the company asks for more details about the patent they are allegedly violating, then the demand increases.
In many cases, the company isn't violating any of the troll's patents, but it costs more to fight them than it does to pay the licence fee, so basically they are engaging in blackmail.
Probably to solve this problem, the USA needs to move to a loser pay system for court cases like what happens in the rest of the world.
Microsoft...isn't one of the companies...supporting this bill
Actually, Microsoft is working against passage.
Rather like the proposed new law in UK that purports to regulate lobbyists, I thoroughly expect this legislation will do nothing of sort and will in fact preserve the status quo or indeed do the opposite. To many Lawyers and corporations are getting rich abusing those unable to afford to defend themselves and it will continue.
Strangely enough, I hope this fails because as smurfette has said above, the patent office is a pig. Putting lipstick on it just prolongs the agony.
The solution to dating this pig is not to dress it up. The solution is to break it off. The uglier it stays the faster we will dump it.
Something I think might be useful, in addition to the obvious one of forcing disclosure of patents that are alleged to be infringed is a requirement to allow a defendant who wishes to pursue a patent challenge to completion before a lawsuit can be tried. I seem to recall that some years back RIM was put in a bind where they had to choose between paying a half billion dollars or so and shutting down in the US, based on infringement of one or more patents that ultimately were revoked.
>The tens of billions of dollars spent on settlements and litigation expenses associated with abusive patent suits represent truly wasted capital
Not for the lawyers who also happen to write the laws (majority of lawmakers anyway). Want to know why things are the the way they are, two words, billable hours. How does one profession put a tax on every other profession you ask? Be the profession in charge of the law of the land.