Favorite In 2022, three companies with strange names and no clear business purpose beyond patent litigation filed dozens of lawsuits in Delaware federal court, accusing businesses of all sizes of patent infringement. Some of these complaints claimed patent rights over basic aspects of modern life; one, for example, involved a patent that pertains to the…
All posts tagged Patents
Patient Rights and Consumer Groups Join EFF In Opposing Two Extreme Patent Bills
Favorite Update 9/26/24: The hearing and scheduled committee vote on PERA and PREVAIL was canceled. Supporters can continue to register their opposition via our action, as these bills may still be scheduled for a vote later in 2024. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote this Thursday on two bills that could significantly empower patent trolls. The…
Victory! EFF Supporters Beat USPTO Proposal To Wreck Patent Reviews
Favorite The U.S. patent system is broken, particularly when it comes to software patents. At EFF, we’ve been fighting hard for changes that make the system more sensible. Last month, we got a big victory when we defeated a set of rules that would have mangled one of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s…
EFF Appeals Order Denying Public Access to Patent Filings
Favorite It’s bad enough when a patent holder enforcing their rights in court try to exclude the public from those fights. What’s even worse is when courts endorse these secrecy tactics, just as a federal court hearing an EFF unsealing motion ruled in May. EFF continues to push for greater transparency in the case, Entropic…
EFF Seeks Greater Public Access to Patent Lawsuit Filed in Texas
Favorite You’re not supposed to be able to litigate in secret in the U.S. That’s especially true in a patent case dealing with technology that most internet users rely on every day. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening in a case called Entropic Communications, LLC v. Charter Communications, Inc. The parties have made so much of…
Fixing a gap in the SEP regulation
Favorite In OSI’s feedback to the European Commission’s proposed Standard Essential Patent (SEP) Regulation (SEP-R), OSI recommended that the legislation add a waiting period for patent claims registered under the regulation as standard-essential after the standard has been ratified. The recommendation was based on the social purpose behind tolerating the presence of royalty-due patents in…
How To Fight Bad Patents: 2023 Year In Review
Favorite At EFF, we believe that all the rights we have in the offline world–to speak freely, create culture, play games, build things and do business–must hold up in the digital world, as well. EFF’s longstanding project of fighting for a more balanced, just patent system has always borne free expression in mind. And patent…
Is Landmark Technology’s Two-Decade Patent Assault On E-Commerce Finally Over?
Favorite Landmark Technology’s U.S. Patent No. 7,010,508, and its predecessor, are very likely two of the most-abused patents in U.S. history. These patents, under two different owners, have been used to threaten thousands of small businesses since 2001. In just one 18-month period, the ‘508 patent was the subject of more than 1,800 patent demand…
This Bill Would Revive The Worst Patents On Software—And Human Genes
Favorite The majority of high-tech patent lawsuits are brought by patent trolls—companies that exist not to provide products or services, but primarily have a business using patents to threaten others’ work. Some politicians are proposing to make that bad situation worse. Rather than taking the problem of patent trolling seriously, they want to encourage more…
The U.S. Patent Office Should Drop Proposed Rules That Favor Patent Trolls
Favorite More than 14,000 people and organizations, including EFF, have sent public comments responding to a wrongheaded proposal by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to change the rules about patent challenges in a way that would favor patent trolls. If implemented, the proposed rule changes could seriously damage the system of “inter partes…