Patent reform is needed now---trolls are profiting off the current system.

In just the past few decades, smartphones, tablet computers and video communications have changed the way we do business and go about our lives.

Policymakers who believe in allowing businesses to operate and innovate free from excessive interference - as did both Kemp and President Ronald Reagan - often look to unnecessary, counterproductive government interventions as the source of free-market constraints.

But today, the free market is not functioning properly because of threats from the private sector and as a result our innovation economy.

Legions of trial attorneys working on behalf of patent trolls are adding what amounts to private sector-generated red tape to our innovation economy, generating waste and inefficiencies and becoming yet another obstacle that individual inventors and businesses with good ideas must overcome in order to thrive.

Rent-seeking patent trolls profit at the expense of successful businesses, promising startups, and forward-thinking inventors. These patent trolls wield low-quality patents and use them to threaten litigation and extort payments from productive businesses.

It's no small problem, with patent trolls accounting for more than half[2] of all U.S. patent litigation annually, and our innovation economy is groaning under the weight of these thousands of meritless legal actions.

A patent system guided by the goal of limiting government would be one with clear, consistent and unobtrusive rules that is designed to work for the innovators with the best ideas - whether it be garage-tinkerers or major national manufacturers. This is not the patent system that we have today.

We need commonsense reforms that will allow innovators and entrepreneurs to use our patent system to bring their products to market free from abusive litigation.

Doing so will make the patent system work again for the folks it's supposed to support, and we don't have to look far to find effective solutions. In 2011, I was at the forefront of the large bipartisan majority in Congress that passed the America Invents Act - the most significant change to our patent system in a generation.

Among the AIA's reforms was the creation of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which allowed patents of questionable validity to be reviewed by expert judges so that they couldn't be weaponized by bad actors like patent trolls.

The principles at play in AIA reforms were simple.

First, U.S. patents are a government-granted monopoly that have implications for American citizens far beyond the individual patent holder. This government-provided exclusive right cannot be taken lightly, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a responsibility to correct the agency's own mistakes by invalidating improperly granted, poor-quality patents.

Second, a lawyer holding a patent that never should have been issued should not be able to profit at the expense of hardworking businesses and innovators who are developing new technologies and contributing to our economy.

If we were able to have confidence that the USPTO would only grant high-quality patents, these points would largely be moot, but unfortunately with examiners only having 19 hours[3] on average to make patent grant determinations, we are unlikely to reach this point any time soon.