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January 10, 2019 06:58 pm PST

Patent trolls celebrate as Trump's new rules breathes fresh life into parasitic grifter capitalism

A golden age of blackmail began in 1996, when the US Patent and Trademark Office created extremely generous criteria for when software could be patented, allowing every shitty grifter to register a patent for $SOMETHING_OBVIOUS (with a computer) -- thanks to the USPTO's laid-back approach to searching prior art, several people could patent the same obvious thing.

That was the first shoe dropping: big corporations, patenting everything under the sun. The other shoe dropped when grifters and scumbags started amassing huge portfolios of with-a-computer patents, then began to shake down every kind of American enterprise -- from municipal bus services to streaming college lecturers to fax-machine-users to podcasters and beyond -- for violating these garbage patents. Billions of dollars were sucked out of the productive economy and funneled into secret, numbered, offshore accounts whose owners were often never disclosed.

Then along came Alice: the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, which gutted "with-a-computer" patents and threatened to euthanize every software patent troll at the stroke of a pen.

There was only one snag: the judges of the Federal Circuit -- who, for reasons best understood by them, love patent trolls -- kept ignoring Alice, forcing the victims of patent trolls to repeatedly go to the Supreme Court to get the Federal Circuit judge to uphold the law.

Now, Trump's Patent Office is issuing new guidance that all but undoes Alice and reasserts the Federal Circuit's troll-friendly doctrine, taking patent trolls off life-support and teeing them up to once again begin draining $29 billion/year from actual business, making actual things that actual people need. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/0qKF4leP3KI/federal-troll-circuit.html

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