People are not challenging patents now---the problem is with the USPTO itself
Joe Mullin 2023 (Joe Mullin is a senior policy analyst at EFF, where he works on patents, encryption, platform liability, and free expression online. Before joining EFF, Joe worked as a reporter covering legal affairs for the technology website Ars Technica, and American Lawyer’s magazine group, June 2nd 2023, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/our-right-challenge-junk-patents-under-threat#:~:text=The%20Patent%20Trial%20and%20Appeal,more%20than%20a%20decade%20ago, "Our Right To Challenge Junk Patents Is Under Threat")//rohan
The Idea That People Challenging Patents Are Abusing The System Is Absurd
The rules create an upside-down world in which people who work to challenge patents are treated as the abusers of the system, rather than the patent trolls they’re up against. For instance, the rules would punish groups that file “serial petitions” or “parallel petitions” by simply denying them access to the PTAB. It also creates new rules denying petitions “to ensure that certain for-profit entities do not use the [] processes in ways that do not advance the mission and vision of the Office to promote innovation.”
But it’s the patent office’s own wrongly granted patents—each one a 20-year government-granted monopoly—that often inhibit innovation. USPTO patents have allowed business models like Lodsys, the company that sent out hundreds of threats to small app developers demanding royalties for using basic, off-the-shelf in-app payment systems. The office has done nothing to rein in patent trolls; but now that there’s a system that can occasionally challenge them.
This is wrong. It’s in the public interest to challenge patents and test which ones are wrongly granted. All properly timed and filed patent challenges should be heard on the merits, whether they are filed by for-profits, non-profits, large entities or individuals. That’s what Congress envisioned when it created the patent challenge process.