Congress Needs to Shut Down 'Patent Trolls'

Congress needs to shut down so-called patent trolls whose infringement lawsuits are diverting company resources from hiring and research, a group of technology companies told lawmakers Thursday.

Representatives of Cisco Systems, SAS, Adobe Systems and retailer J.C. Penney asked lawmakers to pass legislation addressing patent lawsuits from companies known as patent assertion entities. PAEs, called trolls by many critics, don’t manufacture or sell products, but instead are in the business of filing lawsuits or licensing patents they have purchased.

The only lawsuits SAS faces are infringement cases from trolls, said John Boswell, senior vice president and chief legal officer for the software vendor. “Patent trolls are business terrorists,” Boswell said during a congressional hearing. “Their weapons of mass destruction are software and business-method patents with fuzzy boundaries that can be asserted against many different products, many different companies, in many different ways.”