Patents, Compulsory Licensing, and NPEs

The United States House of Representatives just introduced a proposed bill called the SHIELD Act which is meant to curb the amount of lawsuits brought by Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs sometimes referred to as "patent trolls"), companies that buy patent rights in order to file suit against infringers of those patents. Many think that patent trolls hinder innovation by tying up developers' time and money in lawsuits, but that position is not unanimous. Most of the debate seems to focus on whether software patents should even exist. The bill, if passed, would give the judge discretion to award the defendant with the costs of his legal fees if "the court finds the claimant did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, and for other purposes."

My first reaction to this issue is a question. Why can't a compulsory licensing scheme like Israel's Chapter 7 of the Patent Law- 1967, solve the problem of NPEs? If an entity is not using its patents to develop new products and is just using them to sue infringers, the courts would be able to grant a license to the infringer in exchange for royalty payments to the patent owner. Presumably, this option is not favored in the US where property rights are very strong. They don't want the courts to have the power to mandate a license when it is not for government use. Instead they would apparently prefer to deter lawsuits by charging frivolous plaintiff's with defendants' costs.

For an article on compulsory licensing and NPEs, see here. And for an article on compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement and in the US and Canada, see here.

Israel Updates its Computer Law to Comply with the Budapest Convention

Last week Israel amended its Computer Law to bring it in line with the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. The Knesset created a new Section 6 to replace the old one. The new Section 6 makes it a crime to write or distribute software to infiltrate another's computer or or cause that computer to print false information, or whose purpose is to infringe on another's privacy or conduct eavesdropping even without actually causing harm or interference with the compromised system. It also tracks the Budapest Convention in requiring intent for the crimes listed in Section 6.


I couldn't find an English translation of the Computer Law online, so I am providing a translation that I (and Google) made after the jump.


For articles on Israel's Computers Law see this by Ruth Levush who apparently is the Law Library of Congress' Israel law expert, and an article called Computer Legislation: Israel's New Codified Approach from 1996 written by one of the law's drafters, Miguel Deutch, but not freely available online, and here and here for articles relevant to this topic. Bear in mind, however, that all of these sources in addressing Section 6, are addressing the old Section 6.