President Obama Criticizes Patent Trolls

President Obama lashed at the Patent Trolls during his Google+ Hangout and said that his administration’s attempts at patent reforms had only gone about half way of where they should have been. In response to an entrepreneur, who raised concerns about her friends being afraid of starting new businesses because of patent trolls, President Obama said “They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They are essentially trying to leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

President Obama, in 2011 had signed The America Invents Act, which focuses on patent litigation. The bill was a good initiative but as the president admitted that “Our efforts at patent reform are only about halfway to where we need to go.” The president called for a better balance between internet freedom and patent protection “I’m an ardent believer that what’s powerful about the internet is its openness and its capacity for people to get out there and introduce a new idea with low barriers to entry,” he said.

“We also want to make sure that people’s intellectual property is protected and whether it’s how we’re dealing with copyright, how we’re dealing with patents, how we’re dealing with piracy issues. What we’ve tried to do is be an honest broker between the various stakeholders and to continue to refine it, hopefully keeping up with the technology, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasionally going to be some problems that we still haven’t identified and have to keep on working on.”

 

 

Aizaz Haque
Categories: General
Tags: Legal, patents