{"id":20574,"date":"2013-06-07T08:01:18","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T13:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20574"},"modified":"2013-06-07T08:01:18","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T13:01:18","slug":"taking-the-battle-to-the-patent-trolls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/07\/taking-the-battle-to-the-patent-trolls\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking the battle to the patent trolls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/elements\/2013\/06\/how-to-make-war-on-patent-trolls.html\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Wu<\/a> suggests some lines of counter-attack to use against patent trolls:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are good laws in place that could fight trolls, but they sit largely unused. First are the consumer-protection laws, which bar \u201cunfair or deceptive acts and practices.\u201d Some patent trolls, to better coerce settlement, purposely misrepresent matters such as the strength of their patents, the extent of other settlements, and their actual willingness to litigate. Second, there are plenty of remedies available under the unfair-competition laws. Some trolls work by aggregating an enormous number of patents, and then present the threat that one of their thousands of patents might actually be valid. The creation of these portfolios for trolling may be \u201cagreements in restraint of trade\u201d under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, or they may \u201csubstantially lessen competition\u201d under the Clayton Antitrust Act. More generally, the methods of the trolls are hardly what you would call ordinary methods of competition; they should be considered, rather, what the Federal Trade Commission calls \u201cunfair methods of competition\u201d under Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act. The Commission has the power to define and punish methods of business that are inherently harmful with few or no redeeming benefits, and that\u2019s what trolling is. Finally, it is possible that the criminal laws barring larceny and schemes to defraud may cover the conduct of some trolls.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, other than in Vermont, these laws remain largely unenforced, for reasons that aren\u2019t particularly good. Trolls, to switch metaphors, are like cancer cells: they mimic ordinary activity, namely the assertion of patent rights. A war on trolls could become a war on patent holders in general. Since the line between the two can be fuzzy, the argument is that war might deter some real invention. It might, for example, lump universities in with the extortion artists.<\/p>\n<p>But that justifies caution, not inaction. All law enforcement involves this problem of sorting. There is a narrow line between the legitimate trader who knows the stock market well and the criminal inside trader, yet that doesn\u2019t mean securities laws should be left unenforced.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In The New Yorker, Tim Wu suggests some lines of counter-attack to use against patent trolls: There are good laws in place that could fight trolls, but they sit largely unused. First are the consumer-protection laws, which bar \u201cunfair or deceptive acts and practices.\u201d Some patent trolls, to better coerce settlement, purposely misrepresent matters such [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9],"tags":[484,241,529,380],"class_list":["post-20574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","tag-competition","tag-intellectualproperty","tag-lawyers","tag-patents"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5lQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20575,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20574\/revisions\/20575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}