The USPTO, the agency charged with determining whether something falls within the scope of patents, is allowing for Patent Trolls to be searchable. As part of the Obama Administrations to crack down on patent trolls, an online toolkit was made available to help entrepreneurs deal with patent trolls. In an example from the article, a mass-sent demand letter claimed a licensing agreement that required hours of time and cost to disprove. Although the sum requested was a trivial amount, $50,000, the hassle that entrepreneur's have to go through to dispel these false allegations is not worth it. The major goal of some of these entrepreneurs is making access to information about who is filing these alleged infringements easier to find. This toolkit has the potential to correct information asymmetry in the patent landscape by providing more information as to who are the one's infringing.
The online firm Lex Machina uses legal based analytics to do comprehensive search to display critical information about patent trolls, their litigation history, and data on federal patent cases. Although it hasn't had a major impact yet on costs, this search capability allows companies to size up who they are dealing with. In addition, it exposes these individuals to the public eye thereby exposing them as to who they are. However, this solution only solves part of the problem as garbage patents are still out there that prevent entrepreneurs from being ultimately ridden of high costs. The article urges the USPTO to take a stand against these garbage patents to make life easier on entrepreneurs.
The US Patent System is responsible for determining how patents are evaluated. The USPTO provides judgement through the interpretation of patentability; however, judgement of patentability is done by various different parties, including judges, juries, and patent examiners. The wide variety of any individual who may levy judgement on a patent case leads to very different results because of individual biases and expertise. In terms of judges, they have the legal knowledge to weigh a case against previous jurisprudence. Judges generally hear multiple sides of a case and rule with the knowledge that they have about the law. Juries, on the other hand, are quite different in the sense that they hear arguments, but must come to a unanimous conclusion based on the appeal of the prosecutor and the defendant. The last type of individual to weigh in on case are patent examiners, who generally have technical expertise and can evaluate patents based on common technology and similarities between patent technology.
Once a decision on patents has been levied, it is the prerogative of the USPTO to translate the court decisions into administrable tasks for the examiner corps. In this article, it states that the difficult decision for the examiner corps is determining the guidelines on products of nature, laws of nature, and natural phenomena. Essentially the article makes the distinction that has come about because there has been scrutiny over claims and whether they properly or improperly encompass the products of nature, laws of nature, and natural phenomena. According to the USPTO, if a claim "reflects a significant difference from what exists in nature" then it is eligible to be a patent. Conversely, if a claim "is effectively drawn to something that is naturally occurring", it isn't patent eligible. To me the difference seems quite muddled and therefore very subjective, thus leading to interpretations that could vary given ones knowledge, technical expertise, or knowledge of laws.
