President Barack Obama issued a series of executive actions that will attempt to disrupt the frivolous law suits from "patent trolls," reports the Wall Street Journal.
Patent trolls are companies that amass a large portfolio of patents without the intention of ever building new products or innovations. Instead they attempt to collect licensing fees from companies who utilize the patent. The firms that do this claim that they have done nothing wrong and that they are just profiting from the patents that were granted to them legally by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The number of lawsuits from so called patent trolls has increased astronomically in recent years causing great aggravation, and expense, to companies that must fight them off. This is especially rampant in the technology sector, a segment of our economy that the Obama administration has deemed key for economic recovery, according to Reuters.
"Stopping this drain on the American economy will require swift legislative action, and we are encouraged by the attention the issue has been receiving in recent weeks," a statement from White House Spokesman Jay Carney said.
Several large technology driven companies have been pushing for patent law reform for quite some time, including Cisco, Apple and Google, according to Reuters.
Politico reports that President Obama recently spoke about the issue in a Google+ hangout saying that patent trolls "essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them."
One of the reforms that President Obama is calling for is to have the Patent and Trademark office require that patent owners can be identified. If businesses are able to identify the owner of certain patents it will cut down on the number of frivolous lawsuits from shell companies, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Other reforms that the Obama administration is pushing for include training patent officers to detect overly broad patents and to restrict the number of cases that get sent to the International Trade Commission. The ITC has recently been used as a way to get around the potential of a lengthy infringement case in federal court, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Lawmakers in both houses of Congress have been attempting to create bills that will address patent reform recently but have yet to pass any laws.
