For years, America’s leading retailers have benefited from a little-known program that helps to resolve meritless patent disputes, called Inter Partes Review. Congress created the IPR process in 2012 to give businesses an efficient, expert, and cost-effective way to address weak patents that should never have been granted in the first place.
Entities in the business of suing on weak, vague patents take these bad patents and claim that unsuspecting businesses are infringing on them. These opportunistic plaintiffs, sometimes called patent trolls, go after regular businesses, both small and large, across the United States. These stores, restaurants, and hotels paid off those trolls not because the patents on which they were suing were valid, but because it was a lot cheaper to pay a “nuisance settlement” than to try to fight the matter in court.
