Other witnesses were more even handed in their testimony. In responding to a question from Congressman Burgess about the trajectory of the demand letter problem, Professor Gregory Dolin explained:<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to answer your question by pointing out that one person\u2019s patent troll is another person\u2019s innovator. Certainly I am not here to dispute that there are bad actors in the system just like there are bad actors in any system. Just like there are bad actors in medical malpractice litigation or any other civil litigation so I certainly agree that there are actors who deform the system and those should be dealt with. But non-practicing entities and patent assertion entities include our universities who develop cutting edge technologies. They include companies that allow people to invest money in innovation and essentially provide funds to small inventors. So on one hand certainly there are these mom and pop shops that are faced with bad faith demand letters and those should be protected but let\u2019s not forget that on the other side there are equally small mom and pop shop innovators who come up with new research technology that ultimately is used to develop new cell phones, new medications, new machinery that actually makes our lives so much better. So I think the problem is there. I think that — but the problem is I don\u2019t think is as bad as has been portrayed and I think that problem, just like many problems, has two sides.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Time will tell what happens with the TROL Act, which seems to share more in common with the STRONG Patents Act in the Senate than it does with the Innovation Act, which seems poised to soon pass the Judiciary Committee again and go to the House floor for a vote.<\/p>\n
For the latest on patent reform please see:<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The TROL Act was introduced during the 113th Congress and as Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) explained it passed the subcommittee with bipartisan support. Still, Burgess explained during his brief opening statement that he believed \u201cthe text could be amended narrowly to achieve better protections for recipients of demand letters.\u201d Despite the previous bipartisan support, Ranking Member Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said that he cannot support the TROL Act as it is written because \u201cit includes problematic language that does not move us forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19234,"featured_media":56979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[274,5519,228,6555],"tags":[7130,7204,7845,6822,6460,7891,2987,7355,33,89,8731,34,6775],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56978"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56978"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=56978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}