Some of the nation's biggest information technology companies are backing a congressional effort led by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy to, under the guise of "reform," infringe on the ability of patents to protect the rights of their owners. The move threatens the small companies that drive New Hampshire's economy, and the state's congressional delegation should oppose it.

More than 40 percent of all patents are filed by small firms. Among them is AmberWave, a Salem company founded around technology that made faster microchip processors possible, and Smoothshapes, a Merrimack medical technology company. They are joined in opposition to the 2007 Patent Reform Act by the University of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Lebanon. Here's why.

It is becoming rare for big companies like IBM, Vermont's largest employer, and Xerox and Microsoft to run large labs that do basic research. Instead, the big players look to innovators in academia and the myriad startup companies founded around a good idea. If the new product looks commercially promising, the big guys buy the small companies that hold the patent on it or license the rights to use the invention.

When companies take a product to market that contains the patented component in a cell phone or Blackberry, for example, without securing a license, the patent holder can sue for legal fees, compensation and, if the infringement was willful, up to triple damages.

The big companies, which have banded together as the Coalition for Patent Fairness, claim that some patent holders wait until a product is on or about to hit the market before coming forward in order to exact an unfairly large settlement. The coalition sees them as trolls lurking under the bridge to the market, and they want Congress to take their clubs away by weakening patent protection. But doing that could make it impossible for researchers and inventors to raise the money they need to pursue ideas. Without strong patent protection, the promise of a big payoff down the road for investors vanishes.

Leahy wants to change the way patent holders are compensated when their product is used illegally. Instead of collecting an award based on the overall value of the product, they want to limit compensation to the value the inventor's widget contributes to the product. That means judges, not the market, would decide the value of the patented component or technology. The big players also want Congress to prevent patent holders from recovering damages for worldwide sales in U.S. courts.

The bill would also create a panel to review the validity of a patent after it's been granted by the examiners whose job it is to determine that very validity. That would force some inventors to spend a fortune and defend their patent multiple times before they even could go to court to sue over its illegal use.

Taken together, these changes would greatly reduce the value of a patent. They would permit big aggregators of technology to use an invention first and then challenge its patent before negotiating the rights to use it. The bill would increase the risk for innovators, reduce the rewards for success, drive up legal costs, complicate the patent process enormously, and dry up funding for the research done by small companies and universities.

Patent law is arcane and far from the everyday thoughts of most people. But without strong patent protection, the technology that creates jobs, saves lives, and makes new and improved products possible, will evaporate. Congress should kill this so-called reform sponsored by big business.