‘Litigation Transparency’ Proposal Would Give Big Tech a License to Steal
Congress is considering a bill that would inadvertently make it harder for American startups and small businesses to sue successfully big corporations that steal their technology. That would make our economy weaker and less dynamic.
Many Big Tech companies have stolen proprietary technologies from their smaller rivals in recent years.
For instance, last year a U.S. government agency had to ban the importation of certain Apple Watches that illegally incorporated a smaller company’s patented device that measures blood oxygen levels. In January, Google settled a patent infringement case for an undisclosed sum after Boston startup Singular Computing sued for $1.6 billion in damages over the alleged theft of AI technology. An Illinois district court recently ordered Amazon to pay $525 million in damages to software firm Kove IO for violating the firm’s data-storage patents.
These successes are the exception rather than the rule.