Continuing its progress through Congress, the Innovation Act -- a bill to restrain patent trolls -- has cleared the U.S. House of Representatives with an overwhelming majority of 325 to 91 despite opposition from the organizations most likely to feed new patents to the trolls.
The bill's main sponsor, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, said in an editorial this week that "we must put an end to abuse of the patent system and make the necessary changes to ensure that it serves its constitutional purpose: protecting innovators and their inventions." Even the White House supports reform.
But a number of voices, most with vested interests, have been scrambling to protect the trollseven with the concerns of the big trolls taken into account with the reduction of the bill's impact on "covered business methods." This part of patent law is used more by large corporate patent holders and thus opposed by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, and Adobe.
Patent trolls angry - House passes bill to put an end to the patent abuse
