Patent Troll: Anyone Using WiFi Infringes; Won't Sue Individuals 'At This Stage'

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20111001/00365416161/patent-troll-says-anyone-using-wifi-infringes-wont-sue-individuals-this-stage.shtml

by profitbaron • 15 years ago

220 93 15 years ago

techdirt.com

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

> While its initial lawsuits against coffee shops and restaurants did focus on the central corporations, with the hotels, Innovatio appears to be focusing on individual franchisees. Yes, the small businesses who own individual hotels and probably have no idea how to deal with a patent infringement lawsuit -- all because they dared to offer WiFi somewhere in their hotels. To make it "easy" of course, Innovatio's lawyers will let them settle for between $2,300 and $5,000. In almost every case, that's going to be cheaper than hiring a lawyer to just get started dealing with this -- which I'm sure is exactly what Innovatio intends.

Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that can be forwarded to corporate? Someone who owns a Motel 6 would surely expect the corporation to help them with this, no?

colanderman• 15 years ago

Ya but your local B&B can't deal with this. They need to mobilize now and pool together to buy good legal defense.

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

I sort of imagine that the large chains would smack these trolls down pretty hard. Hilton and Marriott and Starbucks aren't exactly mom-and-pop.

mrspandex2• 15 years ago

Original article: http://patentexaminer.org/2011/09/innovatios-infringement-su...

mrspandex2• 15 years ago

I really hope they do start suing individuals. Congressmen, and judges specifically.

kylec• 15 years ago

Patent trolls may be evil, but they're not stupid. The best we can hope for is for them to sue a close friend of a congressman or judge.

saalweachter• 15 years ago

Maybe not stupid, but I think their hubris is steadily growing.

At some point a patent troll is going to fly too high and set fire to the entire business model.

fleitz3• 15 years ago

It's nice to see that Innovatio IP is focused democratizing the opportunity to license their patents. Patent trolling isn't just for the Fortune 500 anymore.

throwaway0815• 15 years ago

Look who's talking: a patent troll himself. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3058876

fleitz3• 15 years ago

Have you considered law school?

Your insights into the actionability of patent applications would be highly informative to the majority of legal scholars and practicing lawyers.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Surely this?

diego_moita• 15 years ago

This is very nice!

Politicians will only solve a problem after it becomes a calamity. If the problem gets bad enough, they might start paying attention.

fleitz3• 15 years ago

I thought politicians just made things worse after problems become calamities. The calamity just alerts them to the fact that there is money to be made being part of the problem.

Watch for campaign contributions to start flowing before these companies start suing regular people.

Astrohacker4• 15 years ago

Politicians created the problem by creating IP laws. If they "solve" it, they will undoubtedly just introduce some new problem.

MartinCron5• 15 years ago

That's a really cynical view, isn't it? Implying that the people, through their democratically elected governments, can't ever improve upon things that have come before.

adestefan2• 15 years ago

Warning US-centric Content. If you're not from the US, then you might not know this.

Patents are the only thing that are specifically addressed in the US Constitution besides the form and function of the Federal government. It was and is a pretty big deal.

prawn2• 15 years ago

Politicians would notice more quickly if they were ever reliant on coffee shop wireless and not working from expensive Blackberry accounts.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

What is this patent actually for? I was looking up wifi, and the precursor to 802.11 came out in '91. That's well over 17 years ago.

greatreorx• 15 years ago

US Patent 6714559 is one they sued several hotels over. It was filed in 2001 but was a string of 6 continuations of a patent filed November, 1991.

colinhowe• 15 years ago

Does anyone know what these patents claim to cover? "wifi" seems a bit broad

skymt• 15 years ago

Here's one of their suits: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fia700405.us....

I don't know enough about the details of wifi to say whether the patents in question actually apply, but it seems plausible. Here are all the patents listed in the suit:

octopus• 15 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, so my question is simple - say that you receive a citation from Innovation and you simply ignore this. What then ? They will actually take you to court ?

jcromartie• 15 years ago

This is exactly what I have been wondering. The case has no merit: they can't sue me for buying a Linksys router, can they?

mcherm2• 15 years ago

The way the US legal system works, if you are sued then the plaintiff and you go to the court and make your arguments. If you don't show up, then they automatically win all arguments they make. Even if the argument is wrong. So you automatically lose, and then it moves to the collections stage.

tl;dr; Yes, they can sue you for buying a router. And win, if your high-priced lawyer doesn't show up in court on the appointed day.

hvs• 15 years ago

Well, if you ignore it and they get a default judgement against you (i.e. they find that you are infringing) then they can do lots of things to make sure you pay up. IANAL so you would want to talk to one if this happens.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

I wouldn't think they could ever win anything. One of the rules with patents is you can't just kick back and wait for your competitor's product to grow and sue 10 years later.

Considering WiFi is almost 20 years old, and has practically surpassed 'ubiquity', I'd say that ship sailed.

mcherm2• 15 years ago

That's the beauty of the scheme. They don't HAVE to win anything. They threaten to sue for $2,000 to $5,000 which is less than the cost of hiring a lawyer to defend. 98% of the people threatened pay up. Some miniscule percentage are incredibly cussed individuals who are willing to spend thousands of dollars just to be right... maybe they'll lose those cases. It doesn't matter: they're still making huge amounts of money.

The only threat to the scheme is having your lawyers be sanctioned for unprofessional conduct. If there was NOTHING behind the threat, this would be a real possibility (like, say, if you tried this scheme when you didn't even HAVE a patent). But as long as it's a plausible case, the threat works and it's highly profitable.

daemin• 15 years ago

It makes me wonder how this is not extortion? Pay up or we'll make your life miserable and/or more expensive.

beagle3• 15 years ago

Never heard of that rule. Perhaps you are confusing with trademarks, which you must defend?

Or you are confused about the damages - you can't collect damages on anything that happened before you told the victim "you are infringing, now stop or pay me $XXX". But you definitely can collect from that point on (triple damages, if willful infringement is established)

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Gah, you're right, I was thinking of trademarks. I need to stop mixing trademarks, patents and copyright up in my head.

crizCraig• 15 years ago

The patent is from 2004. http://www.google.com/patents?id=zi8SAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...

I hope their greed gets the best of them. Here's a poll I created to get general feedback on this subject. It's so infuriating to me, but a lot of people seem to be indifferent on the subject of patents: http://www.wepolls.com/p/3363896/

machrider• 15 years ago

If they applied for the patent in 2001, how can they possibly sue users of wifi? 802.11 has been around longer than that.

caf4• 15 years ago

It's possible that the patent(s) are only alleged to apply to 802.11g and/or 802.11n implementations. At least one of the patents appears to relate to MIMO, which would apply only to 802.11n.

Bud• 15 years ago

Leeches. Someone should destroy these folks. Legally and peacefully, of course. But they must be destroyed.

beedogs• 15 years ago

I'd honestly prefer someone did it with a MOAB at this point.

burgerbrain3• 15 years ago

I'm currently finding myself question my own disapproval of capital punishment. Every single one of the board members of this company could be put to an incredibly painful death by lethal injection and I just might bake a cake.

prawn2• 15 years ago

Not keen on the word "folk" being used to describe them because it has a more homely feel to it, for a common purpose, etc. These people are scum.

danssig3• 15 years ago

It would probably be more effective and work faster if victims of this nonsense just started showing up at these people's houses with ski masks and baseball bats.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

Hams have been doing packet radio since the 70's in earnest and it's been around far longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

There is clearly prior art. When you make this big a nuisance of yourself, clearly exploiting the system at society's expense, you should be permanently disbarred. You are a clear and present danger to the continued operation of the justice system.

Edit: Might a flood of complaints to the bar association do some good here?

caf4• 15 years ago

The existence of packet radio doesn't necessarily constitute prior art. The patents are far more likely to be on certain very narrowly defined processes that are arguably implemented in a WiFi system than on a very broad field like "digital communication over radio". If the hams didn't use the particular techniques at issue, then that wouldn't constitute prior art.

You really need to read the specific claims in the patents themselves to figure out how to invalidate or avoid the patents.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Say what you will about the trolls; these guys have it figured out. They're targeting people with enough cash to make it go away, but not enough to mount a proper defence. Prior art doesn't enter the picture, as the trolls' targets are unlikely to retain counsel. When it costs as much to retain a lawyer as it does to make the issue go away, it's perfectly rational for the small business owner to pay up and move on. Tragedy of the commons at its finest. It's cynical, reprehensible, and evil, but it's a pretty solid business model.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

An acquaintance of mine goes by bars, small stores and coffee shops in his town. He tells them that he knows the neighbourhood pretty well, and that for the low, low fee of $400 a month, he can make sure that their store doesn't burn down or get trashed. It's cynical, reprehensible, and evil, but it's a pretty solid business model.

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

After getting sued a good course of action would be to sue the manufacturer for loses incurred. At least that would get their attention. Somebody could start a class action lawsuit agains the manufacturer.

tjr2• 15 years ago

They should be suing the manufacturers in the first place. Even if we were to assume for a moment that this patent has any validity whatsoever, it would not be the users of the wireless router than owe them a royalty payment, but the router manufacturers. And I seriously doubt that a fair royalty on a single router (such as what you might find in one of these small coffeeshops that they are suing) is in the thousands of dollars.

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

I know, you know, the manufactures know, the lawyers know, but unfortunately the lawyers do not care. They just want to make easy money. This might be a good way to shift the pain to the manufactures.

caf4• 15 years ago

Why? It's not just the implementation of a patented idea that's protected; it's also the use.

waterhouse2• 15 years ago

The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" is highly recommended reading for the question of patents (and other intellectual property). The authors make a mostly empirical survey of the effects of intellectual property laws and of their absence in a wide range of industries, and conclude that their effect is a stifling rather than an encouragement of innovation. I think it's especially appropriate because, while my own opinion on the issue comes from moral reasoning (and it's generally frustrating to try to argue that side), this book presents a wealth of stories and statistics that are just plain interesting to anyone who cares about the issue.

http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinalall.pdf

kprobst• 15 years ago

Intellectual property and patents are not the problem, the problem is the broken system around them that allows these types of abuses.

Jach• 15 years ago

Did you even read some of the book before responding?

waterhouse2• 15 years ago

The book would disagree with you there.

(I could close with that bald assertion, but I won't.) Its basic thrust is that the patent system is "broken" to the extent that it does what it's designed to do: grant to an inventor a time-limited privilege to restrict his competitors so that he can earn monopoly profits that will reward him for his invention.

The book opens with the story of James Watt. Watt made a series of improvements to the design of a steam engine and obtained a patent, which he used to interfere with his competition. In particular, he used the legal system to crush Jonathan Hornblower and his superior engine design; the rest of his competitors had made further improvements, but simply waited for Watt's patent to expire (which had been extended to a 32-year period) before putting them into production. Watt himself was forced to use a technically inferior design element in his engines for some years to avoid infringing on someone else's patent. When Watt's patents finally expired and his competitors could freely enter the market, the number of steam engines being produced and the rate at which their efficiency improved both exploded; furthermore, Watt's company continued to increase production and make a profit for years despite the disappearance of the patent protection.

It seems clear that the overall effect of Watt's patent protection was to greatly slow down both the development and the wide-scale adoption of improved steam engines--and, as a footnote, that it may not even have been necessary to ensure that Watt made a profit. Note that Watt was using the patent system exactly as it had been intended. In the book, we see this happening over and over in detail and across a wide range of industries.

wnight2• 15 years ago

Nope. The problem is granting monopolies and expecting to encourage growth. It's nonsensical.

Even if our courts were up to it, and we see time and hand again that they are not, you simply cannot consistently enforce incoherent laws.

All IP laws other than trademark are harmful to society and the economy and need to be abolished.

radu_floricica3• 15 years ago

I've read that the possibility to patent genes led to the explosion of the field some years back. Are there such positive examples discussed in the book?

0x12• 15 years ago

They led to an explosion of patents on genes, not to an explosion of applicable research. The research would have happened anyway, maybe a bit later or maybe not as patent directed.

SODaniel• 15 years ago

Good luck with that one Trolls.

pyrotechnick• 15 years ago

It's about time the CSIRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Ind...) got some money for their invention.

whatusername• 15 years ago

I have seen a few US writers attempt to call CSIRO a patent troll. Somewhat amusing. This article isn't talking about the CSIRO patent though.

mkjones• 15 years ago

It sounds like they're going after small business owners individually, so not necessarily "any old joe." Still, this gives me hope given how hot small businesses are in the current political climate. Perhaps targeting one or two of the wrong (read: noisy and politically-connected) owners will result in an outcome at least slightly positive for patent reform?

plink• 15 years ago

Do the descendants of Joseph Guillotin still hold the patent on his invention? I fancy a scenario unfolding in today's environment that might vastly enrich his heirs.

tlogan• 15 years ago

This is actually a very good development. This will help that even general public start understanding "patent troll" problem which, in turn, will get some ears in in Washington.

I hope that more and more opportunistic lawyers join the "patent troll" bandwagon. Eventually, some of them will not say "wont sue individuals" because they will understand that changes in IP laws are going to happen soon: make money now or never (very similar to what was happening just before the housing crash of 2008). Then the politicians will act. Hopefully, giving bailouts and not doing reforms will not work for this issue.

Is there anything we can do to speed up this process?

MrUnknown• 15 years ago

While I hate what you are saying, I completely agree with it.

tjmc• 15 years ago

Of course - only sue politicians, the media and anyone else with political influence. Give them 2 options:

1. Pay - where all proceeds will be used to acquire more frivolous patents and lawyers to sue them again

2. Change the law to ban all software patents

DanBC• 15 years ago

Someone needs to set up a Patent Troll company and patent a bunch of processes for political methods / action / campaigning / etc.

Then start trolling politicians.

Patent Troll: Anyone Using WiFi Infringes; Won't Sue Individuals 'At This Stage'

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