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Tax The Patent Trolls, James Bessen, Brian Love
Tax The Patent Trolls, James Bessen, Brian Love
Shorter Faculty Works
This essay argues that Congress should increase the size and frequency of patent renewal fees to reduce patent troll activity. Patents owned by trolls are generally old — twelve years on average — when finally asserted in court. Many such patents were originally filed to protect inventions that long ago became obsolete, and today hold value only because they were written so broadly that they arguably can be interpreted to cover technologies developed much later by other inventors. To shackle the dead hand of old inventions, other countries charge patent owners annual fees that must be paid to keep the …
Make The Patent “Polluters” Pay: Using Pigovian Fees To Curb Patent Abuse, James Bessen, Brian Love
Make The Patent “Polluters” Pay: Using Pigovian Fees To Curb Patent Abuse, James Bessen, Brian Love
Faculty Scholarship
On the heels of a widely reported uptick in egregious patent enforcement, six patent reform bills have been introduced in the last six months. All six bills aim to curb nuisance-value patent litigation, a phenomenon popularly referred to as “patent trolling,” by reducing the cost of defending these suits. In this essay, we argue that these bills, while admirable, treat the symptoms of our patent system’s ills, rather than the disease itself: a growing glut of unused high-tech patents that have little practical value apart from use as vehicles for nuisance-value litigation. Accordingly, we urge Congress to consider one additional …