What The New Patent Reform Act Means For Innovation

The author has the concept of a patent troll entirely backwards. The author is arguing that the trolls are people who have prior art to a patent and then come along and submarine legit patents after they have been issued. In the author's world, the victim is the patent holder who paid the money to get a patent.<p>In the real world, the patent trolls are the patent holders that don't actually use their patents, not the ones invalidating patents with prior art. This law only makes it worse, now the patent trolls don't even need to buy patents from legit inventors, they simply have to patent inventions before the inventors get around to it.<p>Before this you could keep good records of your work and be safe in the knowledge that if anyone patented your idea after you created it, you would at least have the prior art to prove you came up with it first. Now you <i>must</i> patent it in order to be safe. A troll can come along at any time and patent your idea and screw you out of your hardwork.<p>If I'm an un-employed patent lawyer, why don't I just sit around reading tech news all day and patent every un-patented startup idea that comes up and sue the companies for their VC money?

How very nice that they bury the horrible news toward the end of the article.<p>Getting a valid patent is an expensive prospect. Today, many times, small businesses innovate, use their innovation, but never file for a patent because of the prohibitive costs.<p>With this new law, there will be absolutely nothing to stop a large firm, a competitor, or just a random patent troll to notice your invention (which you are using) and then file a patent for it. And then, guess what? You're screwed.<p>IBM happy about the new law? What a shock.

How will this change OSS development? Do we need additional patent lawyers filing patents for every open source idea? What happens when someone makes a commit today and then mega-patent troll notices this tomorrow? They certainly will beat me to filing the patent.

I really hope that this decreases the amount of patent trolling there is, I think that there is nothing worse than if you were to put your hard work into something and someone else comes along and sues you for your good idea.