Fortune: Big Tech wants to keep stealing patents—so it’s going to war with Big Pharma by Andrei Iancu and David J. Kappos
Congress wants to reform a quasi-judicial tribunal that Big Tech firms have weaponized to attack their smaller rivals. Those Big Tech firms are rightfully worried that the reform legislation will prevent them from stealing smaller companies’ technologies without compensation and then exhausting the smaller firms with never-ending legal challenges at the tribunal.
Congress created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in 2011 with good intentions. Lawmakers hoped it would be a faster, cheaper forum to resolve disputes about patent validity compared to the federal courts.
Unfortunately, Big Tech companies almost immediately weaponized the tribunal. After infringing the patents of less-established rivals, tech giants repeatedly challenge the underlying validity of those patents at the PTAB—while at the same time making the same challenges in federal court. They do this to wear down small inventors, who usually lack the resources to defend their IP against an onslaught of parallel and repetitive challenges.
To fix this problem, Congress has introduced a bipartisan bill called the PREVAIL Act, which would crack down on abusive patent challenges and ban duplicative litigation at the PTAB and in federal court.