I received this note in my inbox yesterday:
As you have possibly heard, earlier today, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, announced that he is tabling patent reform legislation that was supposed to come up for a vote tomorrow.
This is a sad (hopefully temporary) end for the litigation reform efforts that had passed the House by an incredible, bipartisan margin and that the President mentioned in his most recent State of the Union Address.
In the last few days, we were seeing good compromise language coming out of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, specifically Senators Cornyn and Schumer, and were optimistic the bill would come to a vote quickly. But the committee chair can unilaterally stop legislation and Leahy has opted to do so. For what it’s worth, we’re hearing that we was pressured to do so by Senator Reid.
This means we likely won’t be seeing fee shifting and other important measures that would have helped protect startups from patent trolls this year.
This pisses me off. And I am not the only one who is upset about this. Rackspace has a great post up on their blog today.
Here is the deal. Information technology startups are probably spending hundreds of millions of dollars collectively on an annual basis fighting off patent trolls. This is a tax on innovation and, I would argue, borderline theft. It must come to an end.
