Next patent reform hearing aims to answer the question “What is a patent troll?”

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith announced that the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property would conduct a series of patent reform hearings over the next several weeks. He’s already held the first (”Patent Quality Enhancement in the Information-Based Economy”) and second (”Patent Harmonization”) hearings in the series and I expect the final hearings to be held before the summer recess.

It’s beginning to look like “patent troll” is amenable only to an obscenity- style definition: You know ‘em when you see ‘em.

The next hearing, dubbed “Patent Trolls: Fact or Fiction” promises to be the most exciting of the series. The brief description indicates that the Subcommittee will use that hearing to address the following questions: What is a patent troll? How many unreasonable suits do they initiate? Are they harming the economy or just enforcing their property rights?

Those questions are sure to prompt great interest in the hearing and will likely elicit spirited debate amongst the witnesses, which have yet to be announced. To ensure full and frank debate on the issue, I would expect to see representatives of the University sector, the IT/software sector, the high-technology manufacturing sector, the biotech/pharma sector, and a representative of individual inventors. If a representative of any of those groups is missing, the hearing will not provide a complete evaluation of the troll issue.

I think many stakeholders will appreciate a direct posing of the question “What is a patent troll?” to the witnesses. I have asked that question several times but have yet to see a litmus-test definition that lets you give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on an individual patent owner. Aside from whether it is proper to limit the rights of patent owners that many people would label as a “troll,” I don’t think the term can be defined legally without circumscribing the fundamental patent rights of many that would not be considered trolls by anyone’s definition. It’s beginning to look like “patent troll” is amenable only to an obscenity-style definition: You know ‘em when you see ‘em.

Maybe the next hearing will show us otherwise.