Summary: Misinformation and even outright disinformation is being spread by Senators Tillis and Coons, whose facilitation of law-buying has gone too far to ignore without fact-checking

THE EFFORT to undermine patent reform in the US has gotten pretty ridiculous. As expected, litigation firms try to water down if not eliminate 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101/Alice (SCOTUS) and they're not succeeding. They're even lying about all sorts of things in a desperate effort to mislead politicians. They make up or 'massage' statistics. We covered this before.

"Coons keeps lying about a whole bunch of stuff while taking bribes exceeding a million dollars from law firms."Josh Landau (CCIA) keeps responding to their recurring themes of lies. He's a credible author on the subject of patents -- and software patents in particular -- unlike his predecessor Matt Levy whose wife worked for the USPTO and who sometimes even wrote for Watchtroll. Landau's latest article (from earlier today) speaks of embargo tactics albeit in lawyers' euphemisms (to them it's just soft-sounding stuff like "injunctions"). He explains that it has "become an article of faith among those complaining that patent reform has gone too far that the 2006 eBay case must be overturned—so much so that Sen. Coons has included it in both editions of his STRONGER Patents Act (one of a multitude of reasons that bill is bad policy.)"

Coons keeps lying about a whole bunch of stuff while taking bribes exceeding a million dollars from law firms. Here's how Landau responded to it:

Using Lex Machina’s data, I examined pre- and post-eBay permanent injunction grant rates. And what that revealed is that the complaint about injunction rates is baseless.

In order to avoid distortion from non-contested cases, injunctions issued as part of a default or consent judgment are removed. Looking only at cases resolved in favor of the plaintiff based on judgment on the pleadings, summary judgment, a trial verdict, or a post-trial JMOL motion, permanent injunction requests were granted in 89.1% of pre-eBay cases.

Examining the same class of post-eBay cases, permanent injunction requests were granted in 85.2% of plaintiff merits wins.

In other words, plaintiffs who win their case post-eBay are almost as likely to receive a permanent injunction as they would have been pre-eBay.

But if nothing had changed, eBay wouldn’t have been viewed as an important case. There’s a simple explanation for why it is.

Many embargo powers are exploited through the ITC, which assesses in a hurry patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in order to just generate a revenue stream for the Office. This is sometimes exploited by patent trolls, either by means of threat or actual action. And that's a problem. "21 of the 27 patent suits filed today were filed by patent trolls," said this account that tracks them, "according to RPX Corp. That's 78%."

Not so unusual a number, either. Patent trolls ruined the patent system's integrity. Parasites is what they are. Purely in it for shakedown, not to create anything. And the only thing that the STRONGER Patents Act promises to make STRONGER is patent trolls (and their legal representatives). ⬆