It’s one of the slickest bait-and-switch maneuvers in recent congressional history. A bill advertised as a targeted approach to reining in patent trolls who extort small businesses has now been twisted into a measure to immunize big tech companies against the patent rights of startups and small businesses who create nearly all breakthrough innovation and job growth in the U.S.
The last time a legislative miscarriage of this scale occurred, it was the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was supposed to prevent financial misconduct by big businesses like Enron. Instead, the law burdened small public companies with multi-million-dollar accounting costs and killed the IPO market for nearly a decade, while still allowing the biggest banks in the world — all of them Sarbanes-Oxley compliant — to plunge the nation into the economy-shattering financial meltdown of 2008.