Congress Owes it to Small Businesses to Pass Patent Reform This Year

I know firsthand how detrimental patent trolls can be to small businesses, as my Connecticut small business, Capstone Photography, was recently the victim of abusive patent litigation in which bad patents were used as weapons of financial intimidation against my small business. $100,000 in legal fees and ten months of litigation later, we successfully defended against these frivolous lawsuits. A federal judge invalidated all three patents, ruling the patents as overly broad and ineligible for patent protection, upholding our arguments that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should never have granted these three patents in the first place. A year later, however, my small company is still recovering from exorbitant legal fees, none of which we were able to recoup from the legal system.

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