And we’re back! Our posting volume dropped in August, but the Patent Progress blog is back in action.
August hasn’t been very busy with developments on patent reform, due to Congress not being in session, but last week brought some news: On August 22, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a long-awaited report, “Assessing Factors That Affect Patent Infringement Litigation Could Help Improve Patent Quality.” On Wednesday, Matt Levy wrote a post debunking some critical responses to the report, and instead demonstrated that the statistics in the GAO report support our message that there is a patent trollAn entity in the business of being infringed — by analogy to the mythological troll that exacted payments from the unwary. Cf. NPE, PAE, PME. See Reitzig and Henkel, Patent Trolls, the Sustainability of ‘Locking-in-to-Extort’ Strategies, and Implications for Innovating Firms. problem.
Last Friday, David Balto wrote about how Minnesota joins Vermont and Nebraska in their AG taking action against patent trolls. And yesterday, David Balto had another post about a new paper by economist Erik Hovenkamp which demonstrated the harms of bottom feeder trolls.
There will be more to come soon when Congress comes back to Washington!
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