Voters dislike patents – patent troll narrative.
Brachmann 18 [Steve Brachmann, a graduate of the University at Buffalo School of Law and served as the President of the Intellectual Property Law Society. “Patent Trolls, Superpredators and Deplorables: The Ramifications of Political Bullying,” IP Watchdog, May 18, 2018. https://ipwatchdog.com/2018/05/18/patent-trolls-superpredators-deplorables-political-bullying/id=97136/]
The rhetoric of the patent troll narrative has done a great job of decimating the U.S. patent system and has led to highly public character evisceration of legitimate inventors over and over and over and over again. To date, this writer can think of one example of an actual patent troll: MPHJ Technologies and the infamous abuse of the scan-to-email patent. That’s the one example of an entity who asserted patents in bad faith through thousands of demand letters without ever once filing a lawsuit. That’s clear extortion in an attempt to obtain thousands in licensing fees on a patent that probably didn’t have value if asserted in U.S. district court.
And yet, the specter of the patent troll bogeyman continues to be espoused by parties in the United States and abroad with very little regard of the dangerous nature of the term, and despite Obama era FTC saying the term is unhelpful and misleading.