"You don't do this just to get money. You do this as part of an overall strategy."
One person who had initial success in asserting patent rights was the late Jerome Lemelson. He claimed to have invented technology used in bar-code scanners, and he collected more than US$2 billion from companies that sell products in the US before his patents were invalidated in a case now on appeal.
Cecilia Lofters, senior intellectual property counsel at General Electric, said that in some cases her company has received patent-infringement claims in form letters that list another company as the violator.
"We'll write back and ask which product infringes and get back, `Oh, come on. You know what you're doing'," Lofters said.
Among the proposals discussed at the conference were forcing the loser in a patent case to pay the winner's legal fees, as is done in Europe, and limiting the ability of a patent owner who doesn't make the patented product to shut down the business of the infringer.
Instead, the infringer would be forced to pay royalties.
The threat of a court-ordered shutdown prompts many companies to give in to demands they otherwise would oppose, said Intel's Simon.
No bills have been introduced in Congress during this session, and the association hasn't taken a position on some of the proposals, partly because not every industry agrees what changes are needed, said Stephen Fox, deputy general counsel at Hewlett-Packard and a member of the intellectual-property group's board of directors.
The group has said it wants Congress and President George W.
Bush's administration to let the US Patent and Trademark Office keep all the fees it collects.
The agency said Congress has taken more than US$700 million in patent fees since 1992 to spend it on other areas.
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