Innovation Alliance Challenges “Patent Troll” Narrative

The Innovation Alliance is launching an important public awareness campaign today that will include features in major media outlets. The campaign, called Who’s Trolling Who, responds to the ‘troll narrative’ that paints patents and patent holders broadly as a drag on the U.S. economy.

The campaign includes a website – www.savetheinventor.com – that will share the stories of inventors who could see their livelihoods, their futures, and the future of American innovation threatened by a weakening of the patent system. The Alliance highlights the misuse of the term “patent troll” by technology incumbents and other large corporations who are using fringe abuses of the patent system to push for a much broader weakening of the entire system.

“While highlighting the behavior of the relatively few patent holders who game the litigation system in patent cases for their own gain, they wilfully ignore the vast benefits that patents and the patent system have delivered to the U.S. economy throughout American history,” says Brian Pomper, Executive Director of the Innovation Alliance. “By doing so, they are attempting to seed public opinion in favor of any measure to combat the ‘patent trolls,’ irrespective of whether it would weaken patent rights for everyone, undermining the foundation of the patent system and ultimately the U.S. economy.”

The Innovation Alliance represents innovators, patent owners and stakeholders from a diverse range of industries that believe in the critical importance of maintaining a strong patent system that supports innovative enterprises of all sizes.