Last Thursday, March 14, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet held a hearing titled “Abusive Patent Litigation: The Impact on American Innovation & Jobs, and Potential Solutions.  Those testifying before the subcommittee included representatives from Cisco, SAS, J.C. Penney, Global IP Group, Johnson & Johnson, and Adobe Systems.

The House’s site provides links to written testimony and a webcast of the hearing itself, which featured extensive questioning from members of the subcommittee.  Below are some links to other commentary on the hearing and the issues covered by it:

• In a guest post at Patently-O titled “Patent Trolls by the Numbers,” Professor Colleen Chien does a deep dive into recent assertions by non-practicing entities.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation live-tweeted the hearing, which you can check out by looking at the timeline for @EFFLive.
• And Patent Progress provided both a roundup of tweets related to the hearing on its Twitter feed, @PatentProgress, as well as a useful collection of some new stories on the hearing.
• Today, Groklaw posted a summary of the testimony and questioning provided by a hearing attendee.

Lastly, due to the hearing’s focus on abusive patent litigation, the recently-reintroduced SHIELD Act was brought up several times.  In a post over at Truth On the Market, Professor Adam Mossoff takes issue with the justification for the SHIELD Act, calling the proposed legislation “a classic example of rent-seeking, discriminatory legislation.”