Li Zhou reports in POLITICO: "Amazon, Google and Oracle are among the tech companies banding together to form the High Tech Inventors Alliance, a new advocacy group pushing for higher quality patents and a more “balanced” patent system that addresses the rise of patent troll litigation. “These companies are all innovators, it made sense for them to get together to work on this issue,” says John Thorne, the Alliance’s general counsel and spokesman. He added the group will play an active role in discussions around patent reform legislation and patent court cases. Adobe, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Salesforce make up the rest of the group’s membership. The eight companies collectively hold over 115,000 U.S. patents"