Deeplinks Blog posts about Innovation
Imagine if the inventor of the Segway claimed to own “any thing that moves in response to human commands.” Or if the inventor of the telegraph applied for a patent covering any use of electric current for communication. Absurdly overbroad claims like these would not be allowed, right? Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not do a good job of policing overly broad claims. August's Stupid Patent of the Month, U.S. Patent No. 8,788,090, is a stark example of how these claims promote patent trolling.
Last week, an Australian court issued an encouraging ruling pushing back against extreme copyright demands. A company called Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBC) has been chasing thousands of alleged file sharers around the world. In the United States, these cases often lead to Internet users being shaken down for thousands of dollars each. In contrast, the Australian court is insisting that DBC’s money demands bear some sensible relationship to the harm it has suffered. If this becomes standard practice, it may protect Australian Internet users from the kind of abusive copyright trolling that has become too common in the United States.
Back in 2011, This American Life toured an office building in Marshall, Texas, and found eerie hallways of empty offices that serve as the ‘headquarters’ of patent trolls. For many, that was the first introduction to the strange world of the Eastern District of Texas, its outsized role in patent litigation and especially its effective support of the patent troll business model. Trolls love the Eastern District for its plaintiff-friendly rules, so they set up paper corporations in the district as an excuse to file suit there. Meanwhile, defendants find themselves dragged to a distant, inconvenient, and expensive forum that often has little or no connection to the dispute.
Today, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard arguments in ClearCorrect v. ITC, a case that threatens to give private companies, via agency power, broad ability to censor and regulate the Internet. But this isn’t a case about net neutrality. Instead, it’s a patent case where the patent owner is asking the Federal Circuit to uphold an agency order banning certain data from entering the United States via the Internet. EFF, along with Public Knowledge, filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that there is no authority allowing this; at least, not the way the patent owner is arguing.
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