There’s a growing and pernicious threat facing Connecticut’s businesses: Patent trolls. Using the threat of litigation, patent trolls are targeting an increasingly broad array of businesses – moving on from just technology companies to Main Street businesses – and sucking billions out of the economy while doing it.
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In Case You Missed It, patent trolls — or non-practicing entities, as they are termed in the legal world — avoid tangling with major companies and go after small end users.
Uber presents Colorado with one of the biggest tests in terms of making the the most innovative state in the nation. If it is truly serious about transforming itself into the best state for entrepreneurs and Internet startups, the choice is clear.
It seems impossible these days to find an issue that brings together members from the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. Fortunately, bipartisan agreement is beginning to form around stopping patent trolls.
There were a total of 121,247 patent grants issued from January 2011 to December 2011, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
It seems impossible these days to find an issue that brings together members from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. In a rare exception to this rule, last month Republican Rep. Darrell Issa and Democratic Rep. Judy Chu introduced bipartisan legislation to help businesses here in California and across the country better protect themselves from patent trolls seeking to exploit and profit off of others’ ideas.
The future of the global economy is at stake. With both the United States and the European Union economies generating over $15.6 trillion in GDP and accounting for about half of the entire world GDP, we must pay close attention to negotiations for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
In April, Dallas-based Neiman Marcus became the newest target of a growing industry designed to cripple companies with litigation on the basis of undisclosed patent infringements. IP Nav, also a Dallas-based “company,” sent a letter to Neiman’s claiming patent infringement on unrevealed “valuable patents in the field of automation of application programs.”
In February, homegrown Vermont success story Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was sued by an entity called EMG Technologies. It claimed the Waterbury company’s website infringed EMG’s patent on an “apparatus and method of manipulation a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming, and scrolling internet content.”
In Case You Missed It, the RIAA has already started pitching the idea that we should do away with the important DMCA safe harbors, which make sure that liability for infringement is properly applied to those actually infringing, rather than tools and services.
The current immigration system stifles our country’s innovative and entrepreneurial spirit and can cause highly skilled professionals to leave our country and ultimately compete against us.