In 2014, the House of Representatives passed a patent reform bill called the Targeting Rogue and Opaque Letters Act to deal with the issue of misleading patent demand letters. Unfortunately, non-practicing entities accuse both large and small businesses on the grounds of patent infringement. Although larger businesses can afford to go through related cases, smaller mom and pop stores can't afford to go to cases, so they often give into trolling entities demands for upfront fines.
MPHJ and Innovatio IP Ventures are two different non-practicing entitities that haven taken advantage of their patenting rights to exploit business in their related fields. MPHJ sent over 16,000 letters to small business demanding payment for their use of basic "scan to email" technology. Similarly, Innovatio delivered over 10,000 letters to cafe and hotel businesses to demand payment for providing Wi-Fi from them. Innovatio even went as far as to target millions of devices that were already protected by patent licenses.
These trolling entities waste a lot of businesses' time and money, especially in regards to smaller business who deem these demand letters as high potential risks for their businesses.
Although the TROL Act's drafting shows that Congress somewhat cares about the abuse that NPEs are inflicting on thousands of businesses throughout America, this act does not bear enough teeth to actually stop trolling identities' greedy schemes.
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/when-it-comes-stopping-patent-trolls-trol-act-not-enough
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