Consider the Source

It's not often that the Wall Street Journal comes out against corporate subsidies.

Usually it only happens when it's something like clean energy subsidies.

So I count it significant that they published an OP/ED from former acting USPTO director Joseph Matal titled, "Patent Lawsuits Are a National-Security Threat."

The opposition to the subsidies arising from IP absolutism has been deepening and broadening, because more and more people, throughout the ideological spectrum, have become aware that rather than, "Promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as the Constitution states, they are instead extreme forms of rent seeking and extortion:

Third parties are increasingly funding patent litigation in the U.S. in exchange for some of the proceeds. This practice was nearly nonexistent as recently as 2010 but now appears to account for about 30% of the country’s infringement lawsuits. The government doesn’t know who pays for or controls these suits. That could allow foreign adversaries to profit from our legal system and threaten U.S. national security.

In 2019 VLSI Technology alleged that some of the tech in Intel’s microprocessors infringed on its patents. In at least two lawsuits VLSI has been awarded some $3 billion in damages, some since reversed and remanded. Thanks to what’s known as the NHK-Fintiv rule—under which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refuses petitions for review if the relevant patents and parties are already involved in litigation—the agency hasn’t taken up Intel’s challenges.

When OpenSky, another party, challenged the same patents in 2021, the office’s review confirmed what Intel alleged: VLSI’s patents were invalid because they claimed features of semiconductor design that were obvious.

………

If a foreign adversary wanted to weaken the U.S., it could hardly do better than wage the type of legal warfare that VLSI has brought against Intel. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has noted in these pages, this practice is a direct threat to America’s security.

What is VLSI and are foreign governments involved in its campaign against Intel? We don’t know. VLSI Technologies Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer in the 1980s and ’90s, has been defunct for more than two decades. The current VLSI makes no products and has no relation to the old VLSI. It appears to have appropriated the name to obscure itself, a common tactic among nonpracticing patent-litigation entities.

VLSI’s parent company is Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund owned in large part by interests in Abu Dhabi. The group is also a member of the International Legal Finance Association, an organization that lobbies against litigation-finance disclosure. VLSI has resisted revealing the identities of the investors in its litigation against Intel. When Colm F. Connolly, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Delaware, ordered VLSI to disclose who was funding its litigation in August 2022, the company agreed to dismiss its case with prejudice. (Fortress didn’t respond to a request for comment.) 

It appears that even right wing pig-felching bastards like Matal and Mukasey are getting disgusted with the excesses of the current patent process.

"F%$# the patent trolls," is something that we can agree with.