Biggest patent troll of 2014 gives up, drops appeal

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/biggest-patent-troll-of-2014-gives-up-drops-appeal/

by imglorp • 10 years ago

223 62 10 years ago

toomuchtodo2• 10 years ago

The ArsTechnica piece says the judge ruled the patent invalid. I assume that overrides the USPTO?

"eDekka's patent, which had been used to sue a wide array of online retailers, described nothing more than "the abstract idea of storing and labeling information," Gilstrap found. Those were "routine tasks that could be performed by a human" and didn't meet the standard for getting a patent. Gilstrap ruled the patent invalid."

fweespeech• 10 years ago

The ArsTechnica piece says the judge ruled the patent invalid. I assume that overrides the USPTO?

Correct.

If the USPTO or the Federal Court invalidates it, it is invalid and stays that way.

http://www.uspto.gov/patents-maintaining-patent/patent-litig...

In general, patents can stay in force for up to 20 years from the time of filing although the actual length of a patent’s life can vary depending on a variety of factors. More information about patent term, and an explanation of how to estimate whether a patent has expired, is available on the Patent Term Calculator webpage. Also, note that the claims of a patent can be invalidated by federal courts and/or the USPTO only prior to their expiration date.

baldfat4• 10 years ago

Wish we could do this for extending Copyrights so that Disney gets their Golden Ticket for Mickey Mouse and everything else gets to be Public Domain.

Make it cost $20,000,000 to file the motion, a million to every Senator's campaign fund and $25,000 for every Representative and $2,000,000 for the Chairman of every committee.

That way it is just upfront who wins a special copyright extension and everyone else get's Anne Frank's Diary, the rest of Sherlock Holmes and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

JDiculous• 10 years ago

How the hell does something like this get granted a patent? https://www.google.com/patents/US6266674

NoGravitas• 10 years ago

Could have been worse? https://www.google.com/patents/US6368227

amelius• 10 years ago

How about this one? http://www.google.com/patents/US4022227

tyingq6• 10 years ago

It gets worse. https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/viewer?url=www.google.c...

Talking between two tin cans and a length of string.

leeoniya3• 10 years ago

submitted on Apr 1 probably as a joke.

Is this patent actually valid?

function_seven• 10 years ago

Did you read the patent? That's not tin cans and a string. It's an improvement that allows it to be packaged in cereal and assembled by the end-user.

Sure it's not complicated, but novel inventions aren't always complex. This is a unique-enough idea that it probably deserves the patent.

shawn-furyan2• 10 years ago

tl;dr:

"This configuration is the most advantageous for molding and for shipping in cereal packages."

The patent is on the specific packaging efficient design, not on the general idea.

MichaelBurge2• 10 years ago

If they're a shell company, I wonder if they'll actually end up paying the fee or just declare bankruptcy and start another shell company. Can the owners be made to pay the fee?

drzaiusapelord2• 10 years ago

Only certain things can pierce the corporate shield, like unpaid workers comp. Legal fees, thankfully, don't.

Of course patent trolling always becomes a discussion of corporate shielding instead of the conversation we need to have: a radical reform of the patent system and a re-thinking of what should be patentable, especially in the software world.

This conversation always gets derailed by the tort reform crowd on the right or the anti-corporate shield crowd on the left. Those are just symptoms to a larger problem and both of those things (torts, shields) exist for valid reasons. Fix patents instead.

toomuchtodo2• 10 years ago

We can fix rentiers and less than savory Texas attorneys at the same time.

DenisM2• 10 years ago

One way to deal with the shell problem us to require a bond to be posted, that's forfeit if the lawsuit is found without merit. An insurance company then can pick the risk and set the premium according to their assessment whether the lawsuit has been filed in bad faith.

The court will have to work extra hard to make the distinction, but that might be the acceptable compromise in dealing with shell companies.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

If the corporation was created for "wrongful conduct" to avoid legal fees, the court can and will pierce the corporate shield.

But you're right, piercing the corporate shield is difficult.

IANAL, just a wikipedia reading engineer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil#Un...

MichaelBurge2• 10 years ago

I'm in favor of a strong legal shield. A business started in good-faith with some legal uncertainty that loses a lawsuit shouldn't cause its owners to have their wages garnished for the rest of their lives.

Shell companies whose sole purpose is to shield the owners from lawsuits that they're planning to make seem like a different matter, though. It would be dangerous to limit them while preserving the usefulness of the first case, but I was mainly asking if there was already something in the law for this. It sounds like there isn't?

WalterBright4• 10 years ago

The patent wars are hardly a recent phenomenon. They go back to tremendous and crippling fights over the telegraph, telephone, auto, movies, radio, television and airplanes.

It's a bit hard to see how patents promoted anything - they mostly seemed to retard progress. The airplane patent wars were so bad that aircraft development shifted overseas out of reach of US patent courts. The movie industry packed up and left for Hollywood to evade patent courts. Industry progress on the TV happened only when the patents expired. And on and on.

chris_wot2• 10 years ago

Here's an idea: undertake tort reform, don't allow corporate shields to exist that allow for shell companies like this one, and fix the very broken patent system.

I'm certain that all three things can be done in parallel.

brentm• 10 years ago

My exact thoughts. One would think rule number one in the patent troll manual is to limit your own downside by doing everything through a shell company.

finstell• 10 years ago

I am just so sick of it. Just make them pay the toll for once, for god sake. How is this damn different than any other criminal offence. We just need a good example of crashing a patent troll. Somebody should crush them, crush them so hard. Then, maybe we can have a chance to end this maddness.

MrQuincle2• 10 years ago

This can be prevented by setting conditions for suing:

* The entity suing should set aside a budget in case they are gonna lose. If the "presumption of innocence" is extended to the case of patent infringement this would be not such an awkward demand towards the plaintiff.

* This fee should not just be to cover lawyer costs of the defendants. If a company is wrongfully sued, it's 1.) a type of defamation, 2.) incurring internal costs regarding time/resources to set up the defense apart from just the third-party lawyer costs, 3.) incurring immaterial costs regarding the sued party who are forced to worry about matters that have nothing to do with running their business. It can be seen as a legal DDOS attack of that business, 4.) incurring future costs w.r.t. setting up defenses against these practices. You don't need to buy locks if there are no burglars. (I personally file patents as a defensive action and it would be great if sharks like these pay for that, because they are the reason I've to do so).

justinlardinois2• 10 years ago

Presumption of innocence is only a thing for criminal cases. Civil cases use the balance of probabilities. To win there, you don't have to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt, just that your version of events is more likely to be true than than your opponent's, however slightly.

Requiring plaintiffs to maintain a budget to pay fees would shut a lot of people out of the legal system, like individuals, for example. It would make it easy for large companies to violate the rights of IP holders.

And if a lawsuit really defames a defendant, after winning they can always turn around and file a defamation lawsuit.

davvolun• 10 years ago

So your patent only matters if you can afford to sue someone stealing your patent? Isn't that swinging too hard the other way?

steveeq1• 10 years ago

Didn't they pass some law making patent trolling a lot harder to do? People keep telling me this, but this behavior seems to continue.

WildUtah• 10 years ago

There is a proposal to make it slightly harder to troll called the "Innovation Act." You can look it up on http://thomas.loc.gov

IT has not passed.

Biggest patent troll of 2014 gives up, drops appeal

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