This bill contains a major blow to patent trolls. The new joinder rules make it much harder to sue multiple defendants in one suit. Companies like Lodsys that want to sue dozens of companies will have to do it in dozens of separate suits.

This hurts them in three ways:

1. Their litigation costs will go way up.

2. Defendants will be much more successful in getting venue changes to a forum of their choice, instead of being force to defend where the troll files. (When there were multiple defendants in one suit, carefully chosen by the troll to be from all over the country, it was hard for a defendant to get a venue change to their home turf because the court would want to keep all the cases together for judicial efficiency, and there would be no district that would be better for all the defendants). This further drives up the costs to the troll because now they will not only be litigating dozens of suits, they will be scatted are over the country.

3. They have a much greater chance of losing their patent. Each trial provides an opportunity for a judge or jury to decide on any number of grounds that the patent is invalid. Once a patent is ruled invalid, that's it for that patent.

There's a good post elaborating on those points from Red Hat's senior patent counsel here: http://opensource.com/law/11/9/new-patent-reform-law-could-r...

Toss in the new rules making it easier to challenge a patent, and the new rules that increase the scope of prior art, and this is overall a pretty good bill from a programmer's point of view.