The president of the U.S.A. Barack Obama has announced plans to reform the laws governing patents to limit the phenomenon of “patent trolling”, which is the use of patents for the sole purpose of restricting competition and to obtain money by legal action or by agreements following threats of such action.

A few weeks ago, Google, along with other companies such as BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat, had submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) a number of comments on this issue. Patent trolls have in fact become a phenomenon particularly common in the technology fields and, thanks to the fact that in the U.S.A. it’s possible to patent software and abstract concepts, in the hardware and software fields.

In cases such as Apple against Samsung at least you know who the contenders are but in many cases the owners of the patents are hiding behind their privatization. In essence, a company sells licenses on its patents to other companies, which use them only to sue other companies or at least threaten to sue them for alleged violations of some of those patents.

One of the measures that President Obama intends to take is to force companies to reveal who the real owners of the patents are so that any disputes become transparent. The patenting possibilities are really broad, such as the rounded corners of certain Apple devices, therefore another measure is to provide more training for the employees of the American Patent and Trademark Office in assessing patent applications to see if they are too broad.

A draft proposal that at least at the moment seems too vague is the one that would allow judges to sanction patent troll who abusing patents to start a lawsuit. This is the case in which the principle is right, but how to apply it? For a big patent trolls it could be worth risking a sanction if for example it’s not heavy compared to the advantage of eliminating a competitor. A small business should instead be careful when it starts a lawsuit even if the defense of its own patent is legitimate when that lawsuit is against a large company which at that point will try to convince the judge that it’s an abuse.

The road to a serious reform of patent management is still long, also because many large companies are interested in maintaining the current situation. Lobbyists will try to influence the U.S. Congress to make changes to the draft proposals that go in one direction or another. It’s a good sign that there are plans for a reform, we must hope that they’re effective and can limit patent trolling which consequently limits technological progress.

[ad name=”Google Adsense 468″]