As aggressive as patent trolls

So maybe you should pick up your rifle, Paul, join a militia and go on an anti-PTAB rally

Summary: The America Invents Act (AIA) and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) maintain and gain prominence in spite of nefarious tactics of attack sites such as Watchtroll

THE nasty lobbying/campaign to decapitate the USPTO may have been successful, but PTAB isn't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, as we noted last month, PTAB handles a record number of patents, which it typically invalidates.

Patent extremists from Watchtroll have already insulted judges, bullied officials (in the online sense) and much more than that... right now Watchtroll is trying to discredit politicians who do the right thing, having developed this obsession with PTAB.

"It looks like PTAB is about to invalidate another software patent of a notorious patent troll that's highly abusive."Jan Wildeboer‏ responded the other day to that same old conspiracy theory from Watchtroll (that Google is behind everything!) with laughter, after Erick Robinson (patent litigation) had said: "Sad but the Obama admin sold the patent system to Google. We are in bad shape in the US re IP. Odd that China is now an IP champion."

No, China is destroying itself with patent lawsuits. But Robinson, being "Director of Patent Litigation" (so proud of it that it's his backdrop in Twitter), must absolutely love it. He profits from patent chaos. They love speaking of "China!" when they run out of arguments.

What happens in the US right now is the opposite. It looks like PTAB is about to invalidate another software patent of a notorious patent troll that's highly abusive. Unified Patents wrote:

On July 17, 2017, Unified, represented by McDermott Will & Emery, filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 6,249,868 owned and asserted by SoftVault Systems Inc., a well-known NPE. The '868 patent, directed to protecting and controlling personal computers and/or components of those computers, has been asserted in multiple district court cases against companies such as AVG Technologies, Adobe, Oracle, and Samsung.

Sounds like this "NPE" [sic] (troll) would be better off dead because all it ever does is sue (good for the likes of Robinson and Watchtroll).

Speaking of which, recall Watchtroll's attack on HTIA some days ago. It's an attack on PTAB itself. Here is a new article which helps explain why they fear HTIA:

Major technology companies are pooling together to launch a new alliance in the hopes of spurring patent reform.

The group, called the High Tech Inventors Alliance (HTIA), is composed of eight high-profile tech companies: Adobe, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Google, Intel, Oracle and Salesforce, who collectively hold 115,000 patents.

HTIA says that it aims to pursue regulatory and legislative reforms aimed at curbing what it sees as nuisance lawsuits over patent litigation. They contend that such cases inhibit them from being productive with the results of their research and development, which the HTIA’s members collectively spend $62.9 billion on annually.

“When the patent system does not function well, it undermines rather than supports innovation, to the detriment of all Americans — inventors, employees, investors in productive businesses and ultimately, consumers,” said John Thorne, the Alliance’s general counsel and spokesperson.

HTIA is primarily interested in PTAB, part of AIA. The likes of IAM and Watchtroll want to roll it all back, making patents chaotic again. Another PTAB foe says that AIA finally dominates as a majority of patents issued are AIA patents. He even plots a graph and says:

The chart shows the results from a ~9000 patent sample showing the percentage of issued patents that are categorized as “AIA Patents.” The key feature here – as of the past couple of months most newly issued patents are AIA patents. It will likely two-more years before we’re up to 80%.

PTAB won't be going away. The patent microcosm lost this battle. It should give up or risk looking (and sounding) radical. As we shall show later this month, it's still lobbying on the matter, but these extremists speak from a position of weakness, not power. Not only the public but politicians too turn their back on them. ⬆