Bonum Certa Men Certa

US Congress Will Likely Stop Native American Tribes From Helping Patent Trolls by Misusing Sovereign Immunity

Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)



Summary: The US political system, in spite of its many flaws, steps in to defend the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) from the "scam" which is passage of patents to tribes that have nothing to do with these patents (for the sake of immunity/protection from scrutiny)

IT HAS been just over a month since sites -- including ours [1, 2, 3] -- bemoaned this. Well, that trick or loophole didn't last long, did it?



A patent trolls expert, Mr. Mullin, who was following this whole affair pretty closely since the very start (although Patently-O had beaten him to it), says that Senator McCaskill called it “[o]ne of the most brazen and absurd loopholes I’ve ever seen.”

Weeks after many of us protested Native Americans' help to patent trolls it certainly looks like the loophole will be closed. To quote:

Allergan's move to stop its patents from being reviewed by handing them off to a Native American tribe is winning support from few people outside the drug company. Now one lawmaker is seeking to ban it.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has introduced a bill (PDF) that would head off Allergan’s strategy without waiting to see whether the judges at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board will even approve it.


Mullin's article does give the impression that there's momentum and the "scam" (as some sites called it) is on borrowed time.

In the meantime, CCIA writes about "A Bridge To Sovereign Patent Funds". Yesterday it explained how PTAB helps stop patent trolls/aggression and how the aggressors retreat to the above loophole not just in the US but also in Japan:

Patent trolls are a familiar concept at this point, but a “sovereign patent fund” (SPF) might not be. This isn’t the kind of sovereign I wrote about recently in regard to sovereign immunity. In essence, an SPF is simply a patent assertion entity (PAE) with backing from a national government.

While government-funded companies that create patent portfolios have been around for quite some time, such as South Korea’s ETRI, they typically functioned as operating companies and research institutions first, obtaining patents from their own research, and only secondarily as patent litigators. It’s only over the past few years that the first generation of sovereign patent funds has arisen, acquiring patents from external sources. These SPFs are formed for various reasons, but they all generally have a protectionist bent, focused on protecting local industry and keeping IP in local hands. IP Bridge, a Japanese SPF, openly states that one goal is to “aggregate [patents] and use them, for example, to support domestic1 SMEs [small and medium enterprises].”

So what can you do if a company backed by the resources of an entire foreign government targets you with a patent infringement lawsuit?

You can file a petition for inter partes review.


We wrote about IP Bridge many times before. Their main proponents are sites which favour patent trolls. We last wrote about it less than a week ago and many times earlier this year.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Promoting Microsoft Windows With LLM Slop
What is the policy at BetaNews regarding LLM slop?
Alex Oliva, the Potential 'Successor' of RMS, Has a New Web Site
More freedom for Alex Oliva
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 16, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, February 16, 2025
Links 16/02/2025: Nostalgia for Physical Media and the US Government Actively Promotes Pro-Kremlin Politicians in the EU
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/02/2025:Life, Cynicism, and languages
Links for the day
Links 16/02/2025: Oligarchs "Collect Your Data and Control Your World", Global Temperatures Shoot Up
Links for the day
Links 16/02/2025: "Microsoft Is Laying Off Employees" and Internal Dissent Brewing at Facebook Over Regime Complicity
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 15, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, February 15, 2025
Links 15/02/2025: Harms to Health, Public Domain, and More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: On Autistic People, AuraGem Over HTTPS
Links for the day
The Cyber Show (C|S) Speaks of the "Rise of the Nerd Reich."
This 'Valentine Episode' is quite good
Azure is Turning 17 This Year, Still Losing Money and Staff
Hallmark of pyramid schemes, deriving "value" out of things that do not really exist?
Strong Momentum for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as Winter Approaches Its End in Boston or in the Northern Hemisphere
FSF's founder, Richard Stallman, gives another talk in Italy in 9 days from now
The 'Drunken Plagiarists' Are Harming Journalism About GNU/Linux
They lessen the incentive to do real journalism abut GNU/Linux
Female Nazis and racist Swiss women
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman on RISC-V and Free Hardware
Invidious is under attack by Google
Links 15/02/2025: Erasing of American Science and Tesla SLAPPing Critics
Links for the day
IDG 'Reviews' of GNU/Linux Now Contain LLM Slop
It's typically ads or commercials... or sometimes spin disguised as news
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: Spectacles and "Before Sunset", Moving Domains Out of the US
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Only $17,482 Million Left, "Cash on Hand" Sank 40 Billion Dollars in 2 Years
Microsoft runs low on money in the bank
YouTube Layoffs Mean That YouTube is Still Losing a Lot of Money (Net Income or Profit Almost Definitely Negative)
In more recent years Google defunded many vloggers
In Gopher and Gemini Protocol People Abandon Services Based in the United States
There's no resistance whatsoever
Python and Microsoft: Pandas Should Have Known OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft Excel Are Different and Competing Things
now we're meant to think that in order to open ODF files we need some functions with "Excel" in their name
Not Only Windows, Surface, and "Hey Hi" PCs; Microsoft's Hardware Ventures Are a Dumpster Fire; HoloLens Mixed Reality Hardware Now Axed Altogether and Staff is Miserable
Microsoft is in a terrible state
Certificate Authority (CA) Let's Encrypt Now Down to TEN (0.3% of the Whole) in Geminispace
The number of capsules that use Let's Encrypt is, according to Lupa, about to fall to single-digit figures
Links 15/02/2025: University Price Hikes and Copyright Action Against Slop Companies
Links for the day
Slopwatch: All Those New 'Articles' Are Fake and Crafted by Chatbots (LLM Slop)
Google News is promoting these as "Linux" news; they're not even made by humans
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 14, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, February 14, 2025