Bob Stoll Quoted in IP Watchdog on Past Drinker Biddle/NERA Patent Troll Program

Washington, D.C., partner Bob Stoll was quoted in IP Watchdog – an online magazine focusing on the news and business of intellectual property.

Bob spoke to IP Watchdog about an upcoming program, co-sponsored by Drinker Biddle and NERA Economic Consulting, titled, “Effective Responses to Patent Trolls: We Can Cross That Bridge.” The program takes place in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, May 8, and will feature Bob Stoll, Washington, D.C., partner Bob Skitol, Cythia Bright of Hewlett Packard, USPTO Silicon Valley Director Michelle Lee, and Yale professor Fiona Scott Morton as speakers.

Bob said the program “will explore the reasons for the steady — some would say explosive — rise in PAE enforcement practices in recent years and what various categories of the targets of these practices might do about it.” He said he believe that solutions to the patent troll problem lie in more meaningful patent law and PTO reform.

Bob said the Patent Troll Program would include discussion of: “[n]ovel applications of (a) Section 7 of the Clayton Act, the “anti-merger” statute, to challenge multiple transfers of patent portfolios from operating companies to PAEs with resulting “massive” aggregations that create both the ability and the incentive of the PAE to engage in exclusionary conduct; (b) Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act to challenge agreements between transferring operating companies and the transferee PAEs that govern the PAEs’ enforcement undertakings and that then result in exclusionary conduct; and (c) Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair methods of competition” and “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” to catch a potpourri of other and related abusive practices.”

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