Supreme Court Rules Against Patent Trolls

On Thursday the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously
decided that ideas themselves can not be patented. As

Wired notes, the ruling is a major blow to patent
trolls and “could prevent some of the most frivolous patent cases
from moving forward.”

Reason TV reported on the issues surrounding patent trolls back
in 2013. “How Patent Trolls Kill Innovation” was originally
released on Feb. 20, 2013 and the original writeup is
below. 

“My statement to someone that is the victim of a patent troll
lawsuit is that you are completely screwed,” says Austin Meyer, who
is himself the target of a so-called “patent troll”
lawsuit. 

Meyer is a software developer and aviation enthusiast. His two
passions intersected in the ’90s when he created a flight simulator
called X-Plane,
which quickly grew in popularity, outlasting even the once-popular
Microsoft Flight Simulator. As many software developers
do, Meyer made his application available on mobile devices like the
iPhone and Android. And this is where he first ran into
trouble.

A company called Uniloc has sued Meyer for patent
infringement over a patent called, “System
and Method for Preventing Unauthorized Access to Electronic
Data.” When a computer runs a paid application, one way
that developers can assure that a customer has actually purchased
the application is by coding the application to match a license
code with an encrypted database. This is a method that most paid
applications on the Android market use. It’s a method
that Meyer argues has
been in use since at least the late ’80s. This is the idea
that Uniloc claims to own.

“A patent troll is a company, a person… who owns patents, but
doesn’t make anything or sell anything,” says Julie Samuels,
an attorney and the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Samuels says that patent trolls are a huge tax on innovation and
add nothing valuable to the marketplace. A study out of Boston
University estimates the direct economic damage that patent trolls
cause to be
around $29 billion a year, and this doesn’t account for
hush-hush, off-the-record settlements. But the bigger problem, says
Samuels, is the patent system itself.

“You can’t separate the problem with the patent
troll from the problem with software patents,” says Samuels. “There
are hundreds of thousands of software patents floating around that
are really broad, that are really vague … and a lot of them are
bought up by patent trolls.”

A Yale study found that the U.S. patent office is approving new
software patents at an approximate
rate of 40,000 a year. That’s more than 100 new software
patents every day. Tracking every software patent to make sure one
is not in violation would be an utter impossibility without a
full-time team of lawyers on staff.

Uniloc, which purchased the patent in question at a bankruptcy
proceeding, declined an interview request for this piece. But on
their website, they brag about a victory over software giant
Microsoft resulting
in $388 million in damages (though this amount was later
lowered in an appeals court). Despite the enormous risk, and the
enormous cost just to defend against a patent suit, Meyer is
resolved to do so.

“I will not simply give somebody money that endorses the idea
that they should sue people for doing something amazing,” says
Meyer. “It must be stopped at some point.”