Adam Mossoff, a patent law expert and professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, who is chair of the Forum for IP at the Hudson Institute and a visiting intellectual property fellow at the Heritage Foundation, writes in The Hill, on “Big Tech’s ‘patent troll’ attacks are a smokescreen — don’t let them fool you“:

…Big Tech companies with their legions of DC lobbyists have been on a crusade to weaken the International Trade Commission (ITC), a little-known, independent, nonpartisan federal agency tasked with protecting the United States from imports that violate U.S. laws, including U.S. patent laws. These companies are now at it again, lobbying for a bill that was recently re-introduced in Congress: the Advancing America’s Interests Act (AAIA).

The AAIA would severely restrict the ITC’s ability to block imports manufactured in China that violate U.S. patents. The bill’s title, of course, is classic Washington Orwellian double-speak —this legislation would significantly undermine American innovators and U.S. interests.

A dirty little secret about Big Tech companies is that they profit handsomely from taking the patented ideas of other American innovators. They incorporate these inventions into their products and then they refuse to pay the innovators who created them. It’s called “predatory infringement.” Two recent lawsuits by American startups, Sonos v. Google and Masimo v. Apple, highlight this practice and reveal the tip of the massive IP piracy iceberg by Big Tech companies.

[…]

If we allow patent-infringing products to be imported, we undermine the legal engine that has driven the U.S. innovation economy for over two centuries: the patent system. American inventors and the venture capitalists and investors who fund them need to know that their patents will be enforced, even when infringed by a large, powerful tech company.

In their campaign to close the doors at the ITC to American innovators, Big Tech companies and their backers have promoted arguments again and again that so-called “patent trolls” are using the ITC to hurt U.S. companies. It’s self-serving, false rhetoric that aids their predatory infringement.

In fact, there is no evidence that the ITC is over-run by “patent trolls.”

Read the entire article.

 

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