The Linux Defenders: Stop the Trolls, Protect Linux, Further Innovation

Patent Trolls are an ever-growing threat to global innovation. These organizations purchase low-quality patents and use them as leverage to hijack potential revenue and profits from technology companies, our largest economic driver. This causes entrepreneurs to reconsider launching companies, while CEOs devote more of their time and resources to defending their intellectual property. New tools and methods are becoming available to combat Patent Trolls and enable technology companies to focus on their core business.

Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables open source innovation and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux, has unveiled the free Linux Defenders program, which is designed to make prior art more readily accessible to patent and trademark office examiners, increase the quality of granted patents and reduce the number of poor quality patents.

Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, will talk about how Linux Defenders, an online database open to all, offers the Linux and broader open source community a unique opportunity to harness its collaborative passion, intelligence, and ingenuity to ensure Linux’s natural migration to mobile devices and computing. He will also detail how this landmark program will benefit open source innovation by significantly reducing the number of poor quality patents that might otherwise be used by patent trolls or strategics whose behaviors and business models are antithetical to true innovation and are thus threatened by Linux.

The Linux Defenders website is located at http://www.linuxdefenders.org.