A very interesting provision that has not received much publicity is the changes to joinder. Joinder is a procedure for combining lawsuits involving multiple parties. As Wikipedia describes it:<p><pre><code> Joinder is a legal term, which refers to the process of
joining two or more legal issues together to be heard in
one hearing or trial. It is done when the issues or parties
involved overlap sufficiently to make the process more
efficient or more fair. It helps courts avoid hearing the
same facts multiple times or seeing the same parties return
to court separately for each of their legal disputes.
</code></pre>
Patent trolls like to use joinder when they sue several different defendants over the same patent to have the suits handled as one suit. The patent reform bill specifically disallows that--you can no longer base joinder on just the allegation that the defendants all infringe the same patent (and courts can no longer consolidate cases on that basis unless the defendants consent).<p>When this is combined with the rules that went into effect a couple of years ago that made it easier for defendants to get venue changed in patent suits, and the net effect is going to be to significantly raise the litigation costs of the trolls.<p>Before today, the troll could sue many companies in one suit in Texas, or in separate suits and get them combined. Individual defendants might have tried to change the venue to someplace more convenient (such as where they, and all their witnesses, are located), but the courts would have favored keeping the cases together as one suit where filed, rather than multiple suits in multiple locations. Now those will stay separate suits, and many more defendants will get to transfer them out.<p>In addition to raising the litigation costs of the trolls, this significantly raises the chances they will lose their patents. If they sue, say, 10 companies and that results in 10 trials now instead of 1 trial, all it takes is for <i>one</i> of those juries to determine that the patent is invalid, and that's the end of future trolling with that patent. (You might think at first that it wouldn't work that way, because district court decisions just determine the result among the parties at that trial--they don't set precedent on legal issues or on facts between other parties, but it works different for patents. I don't fully understand why, but my educated guess is that it is because the patent office is sort of a party--the jury is finding that the patent office did not consider the proper prior are or misjudged non-obviousness or whatever, and so that changes the status of the patent itself).<p>Unfortunately, the joinder change only applies to suits filed after the bill was signed so this will have no effect on the Lodsys cases that have already been filed.