Tangential, but was just thinking about this today.

Last week I visited the white house as a part of this program -> http://www.businessfwd.org/

The two topics I brought up with the administration were patent reform and immigration reform. Brought up all the obvious issues that play on HN frequently. Today I got a follow up email intro to someone at the USPTO and here's a copy of my reply to that person. I also pointed him to the defendinnovation.org.

Text of my message to USPTO----

The main concern I brought up during the white house visit was around software related patents and frivolous lawsuits by trolls. I'm sure you get this question often from technology and startup folks, but in my opinion it's pretty clear that the USPTO is effectively levying a giant tax on output of my industry due to issuance and complicit enforcement of patents around elementary concepts.

To me the biggest costs to our economy come in the form of -

- fear of patent conflicts prevent new companies from doing truly novel things that would generate jobs and innovation

- costs of licensing patents from trolls or patent groups impede growth of companies at the most delicate nascent stage (e.g. MPEG-LA or Intellectual Ventures)

- settlements out of court with trolls and/or direct costs of litigation to defend (for the bravest large companies who want to take a stand, e.g. google)

- giant piles of money burned litigating frivolous patent disputes between large companies as a proxy for competing directly in the market (oracle vs google)

In general software patents attract the worst elements of the free market. People and companies that take advantage of the system, who extort, abuse and profit from the structural deficiencies of the USPTO. A typical patent troll group will acquire a set of frivolous software patents covering concepts in use in literally any major piece of software so that technically every large company is an infringer. They will then approach a set of large or medium companies with a veiled threat and offer to sell a share of the patent troll entity. They give a choice to their target to get on board or take an ethical stand and if the victim chooses the later, they'll get sued for infringing and likely be forced to settle because truly there is infringement according to the drafting of the patent that was granted. It's the modern mafia.

The root cause of all of these problems are two fold

1 - granting of patents for non-novel and trivial software and concepts

2 - inability to efficiently litigate and have a patent invalidated by demonstrating that it is truly trivial

Google is a major force of good in this fight and the Oracle litigation has shown my industry a great deal of hope on this front. In particular Judge Alsup on that case showed a very keen understanding of the technology in question and how ridiculous the patent was that Oracle litigated with. That story had a happy ending, but honestly in large part because of that one judge. If this were a different court there could have been a vastly different outcome.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57445082-94/judge-william-a...

My question to you is simple - How can we address these root causes?

The current patent system and review system was not designed for software and is clearly failing to adapt to the current environment and pace. USPTO is granting patents at an ever increasing rate. We quite literally are in such a broken state that I would wager that every piece of software being sold today is infringing on some patent. How long until that structure completely halts the development of any innovation at all?

Too big of an issue to ignore. Thanks for listening.