Week 5 EOC: Patent Trolls

Such validations by the courts of the right to sue and collect money over such trivial things like putting an outdated patent number on a product by people who were not harmed by the products in question only serve to give courts and lawyers a bad name and show how out of touch they are with the values of society. They only serve to reinforce the public’s already low opinion of lawyers and courts.

Allowing a company to be sued for each product with a wrong number will create lots of work for manufacturing companies. They will have to hire people to find out which patents of theirs are expired, take those products off the shelves and then change the molds of all such items. They will need a team of people looking for infringements and dealing with all the lawsuits. Alternately, they would have to settle out of court, which is legalized extortion by these patent trolls. In the long run, most companies will probably stop putting patent numbers on their products altogether to avoid such hassles. This will make their patents harder to enforce and may serve to reduce the value of the patents.

All of this extra work created and money spent is unproductive and could be better spent on things like advertising or research and development. The main beneficiaries are lawyers. No wonder countries like China have such low manufacturing costs – they don’t have to put up with such frivolous regulations.

If a company has the wrong patent number on a product, they should be allowed to change it in future versions within a certain amount of time and only if they fail to do so should those who bring about such lawsuits benefit. Alternately, the courts should rule that the only people allowed to bring about such lawsuits should be those who can prove they personally were harmed by such practices, like if they are competitors to those companies.