Patent Trolls

Barnes & Noble alone has been sued by “non practicing entities”—a/k/a patent trolls—well over twenty-five times and received an additional twenty-plus patent claims in the last five years. The claimants do not have products and are not competitors. They assert claims for the sole purpose of extorting money. Companies like Barnes & Noble have to choose between paying extortionate ransoms and settling the claim, or fighting in a judicial system ill equipped to handle baseless patent claims at costs that frequently reach millions of dollars [..].

Something must change. Common sense and the elimination of this blight on the economy are not the only reasons why. There is also a constitutional basis. The Patent and Copyright Clause grants Congress the power “[t]o...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not science fiction and litigious arts. (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 (emphasis added)). But the current system allows trolls to pursue fantastic allegations—claims that would be laughed out of the room in actual scientific or technical circles—in endless litigation that taxes and taxes true innovators while making no meaningful contribution to society [..].

Even the most plainly baseless lawsuits are expensive and can take years to defeat. In at least four cases, Barnes & Noble has faced litigation by patentees asserting the same theories on which they previously lost. In one case, for example, Barnes & Noble is alleged to infringe patents because BN.com uses the HTML language and returns search results other than exact matches. The patentee asserted these allegations against Barnes & Noble despite having tried and lost a case against other ecommerce retailers based on the same functional allegations levied against their websites. In two of these four cases, the patentees ceased pursuing claims against Barnes & Noble once the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed their earlier losses. But in two others, the appeals are not yet final and although Barnes & Noble has filed dispositive motions, the litigations have carried on actively for years.