Posts Tagged: "Patent Trolls"

Blockchain technology has already disrupted the financial sector and new blockchain use cases are emerging every day — from corruption-proof land registries to licensing digital assets, to tracking individual diamonds. In fact, there are many who say that blockchain technology has the potential to be as disruptive as the Internet… To stop patent trolls, the Chamber of Digital Commerce launched the Blockchain Intellectual Property Council (BIPC) this year. BIPC’s goal is to develop a global, industry-led defensive patent strategy that will nip blockchain patent trolling in the bud. Its first meeting on March 30th attracted 40 participants. In the next meeting in April, that number rose to 70. The BIPC executive committee members are the “who’s who” list of blockchain stakeholders, including Chain, Digital Asset, IBM, Microsoft, CoinDesk, Blockstream, Bloq, Civic, Cognizant, Deloitte, Digital Currency Group, Ernst & Young, Gem, Medici Ventures, T0.com, TMX and Wipfli.

A $1 trillion a year industry not wanting to pay innovators less than a 1% royalty on the innovations they appropriate (i.e., steal) for their own profits seems like a terrible price to pay given the national security and economic consequences of forfeiting our world leadership to the Europeans and Chinese… Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google or Uber a patent troll? What about General Electric, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Whirlpool, Kraft Foods, Caterpillar, Seiko Epson, Amgen, Bayer, Genzyme, Sanofi-Aventis, and Honeywell, to name just a few?

The day’s hearing focused on the patent troll narrative despite the lack of a substantive connection between that narrative and the TC Heartland case… Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House IP subcommittee, started his remarks by asking to what degree the Supreme Court’s decision in TC Heartland fixed a decade-old problem. Noting that new lawsuits have hit consumer electronics giant Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) in the Eastern District of Texas (E.D. Tex.), Issa went on to say that “patent trolls, in my opinion, are the scourge of the patent world. We have time and time again attempted to stop patent trolls while in fact being objected to by genuine innovators who feel that they will be trampled in our effort to stop the worst of the worst.” Issa also opined that the TC Heartland decision now likely makes businesses of all kinds avoid the jurisdiction of E.D. Tex. “Why set up shop in Eastern Texas if it creates venue for patent infringement,” he said.

After TC Heartland, patent infringement filings by patent trolls should be greatly reduced because they can no longer simply file and maintain cases against domestic corporations in plaintiff-friendly districts such as the Eastern District of Texas. Unfortunately for Marshall, Tyler and other East Texas towns, the torrent of lucrative patent litigation-related business traffic may slow to a trickle.

despite the media widely lambasting Smartflash as a patent troll, inventor Patrick Racz actually created a company called Internet plc “to develop, manufacture, and commercialize the invention”; Smartflash was created as an entity to hold the intellectual property… One reason why this case might warrant an en banc rehearing includes the fact that the case was decided by a different judicial panel than the panel which heard Smartflash’s arguments in the case. The March 1st decision was handed down by a panel which included Chief Judge Sharon Prost, Judge Pauline Newman and Judge Alan Lourie. An order entered in the case last June, however, lists a Fed. Cir. panel which includes Judge Jimmie Reyna, Judge Richard Taranto and Judge Kara Stoll. It appears to be unclear why a wholesale change of judicial panel was made leading up to the March 1st decision of the Federal Circuit.

The pressure to adhere to the patent troll rhetoric was difficult for people to grasp if they don’t live within Silicon Valley, Causevic noted. He noted a conference which he was invited to speak at which changed its title from “Have We Gone Too Far in Weakening Our Patent System?” to “Where Are We in Eradicating Weak Patents?”, a radical shift in focus. “The pressure is very personal,” Causevic said, citing a paper he had worked on which found that company directors were often pressured against telling shareholders to monetize their patents as it could hurt their chances at employment with an anti-patent tech firm later on. As Taylor would add, this pressure affects the “tens of thousands of little companies started by entrepreneurs” in that region which live under a cultural overhang created by the large Silicon Valley entities.

Due to the death of the patent troll narrative, venue reform would never have made it through Congress, but the infringer lobby doesn’t need Congress when they have a Supreme Court. They just need to make it sound like Congress may pass it and the Supreme Court will just do it for them, as if the Court can’t help themselves but to meddle in patent politics as they continue to disrupt generations of well settled patent law with practically every decision. However, this mode of lawmaking comes with very serious consequences. A group of nine liberal art majors who have never started up a company with the sole asset of a patent need a lot of information in order to understand the effects of their decisions. It is clearly evident from eBay, Alice and virtually all of the Supreme Court’s major patent decisions in the last decade that they do not understand the consequences of their decisions.

The true agenda of those who support further reform of the U.S. patent system is as follows: to discriminate against entities which license technologies instead of manufacture; to increase the costs of asserting patent rights to the detriment of individuals and startups; and to stilt the conversations surrounding tech licensing in favor of the infringer bringing a product to market. “If you trip over our patent, you’re a thief. If we trip over your patent, you’re a troll,” Giancarlo said… “Let’s call patent reform for what it is: a blatant economic and power grab by tech firms to infringe on technology created by others,” Giancarlo said. In his opinion, the true trolls are the entities trolling Congress to get a competitive advantage over smaller entities.

The beauty of the patent troll narrative was it took little time to absorb and instantly painted a pejorative picture in the minds-eye of the listener. It became easy to repeat. Its bumper-sticker simplicity lead to widespread usage, which ultimately (and quickly) became accepted as fact without much, if any, critical thought. Most important, the strategy by-passed the arcane complexity of its convoluted subject matter by shifting the burden of Congressional persuasion to its victimized and under-resourced opponents… Expect big tech and its leftist bed-fellows to exert more effort to “de-propertize” patents on Capitol Hill and in the courts… Expect proponents of reform to mischaracterize patent reform as a step towards tort-reform, which is nearly comical given that the tortfeasor in the equation is the party that is trampling on the property rights of patent holders through infringement, which is many times purposeful and willful.

Unified Patents is a relatively new form of patent troll that works as a “Troll of Trolls” or “ToT.” They file IPRs (inter-partes reexamination requests) to kill patents. While they purport to only attack “bad patents,” their definition of a “bad patent” is simply any patent asserted against their clients. So who are their clients? Good question – that is a large part of the problem. They keep most of their clients’ identities secret. Unified does identify a handful of their members on their website such as Adobe, Google, NetApp, Roku, and Salesforce… But China is different. Here, a mercenary third party attacking innovation via patents is problematic. China, unlike America, has made innovation a top priority. China’s government has also, over the last few years, created the best patent enforcement environment in the world.

Because patent trolls prefer filing in the Eastern District of Texas, the thinking goes that it will be a significant blow to patent trolls if the Supreme Court does not agree with the Federal Circuit. In other words, the days will be numbered for patent trolls if the Supreme Court determines that Congress did not expanded patent venue with the 1988 amendment that made the statutory definition of corporate residence found in § 1391 applicable to patent cases. That conventional wisdom is wrong!… Reflection Code has brought patent infringement actions in the Eastern District of Texas, but on March 31, 2017, Reflection Code brought two separate patent infringement lawsuits in the Eastern District of Michigan — one against Bissell, Inc. and the other against Mattel, Inc.

When a product or process worth stealing is created the party that is considered the innovator is the thief and the party that is considered to be standing in the way of innovation is the party that actually invented the thing int he first place. What an entirely screwed up way of viewing the world of innovation!… Obviously, this article was intended to just mention as many patent related buzz words to capture search engine traffic. How else could you pivot from from a discussion of Kyle Bass to a discussion of TC Heartland v. Kraft? … Of course, that doesn’t stop Forbes from saying that patent trolls will be in trouble if the Supreme Court decides “defendants can pull cases from the plaintiff-friendly Eastern Texas district.” But TC Heartland has absolutely nothing to do with the Eastern District of Texas, or Texas, or the South for that matter. And it has absolutely nothing to do with patent trolls either! Of course, you’d never know that from reading Forbes. In fact, you’d think the exact opposite.

If the Supreme Court were to reverse the Federal Circuit and revert back to Fourco Glass, that would make it difficult for patent owners, including Whirlpool and others like them, to reasonably seek redress for patent infringement. Essentially, a reversion back to Fourco Glass would mean that patent infringement cases brought by corporations like Whirlpool would have to literally be brought in the home court of the patent infringer, or perhaps in Delaware where so many entities are incorporated. It would also necessitate a multiplicity of lawsuits, as Whirlpool explained in its amicus filing.

The patent troll problem has always been a creation of large operating companies. They obtained dubious, highly questionable patents. These low quality patents were then sold to other entities so they could specifically and intentionally be used to sue other large operating companies… Post grant challenges were created in the AIA for the express purpose of getting rid of these low quality patents. The large operating companies that so desperately lobbied for new procedures to challenge these low quality patents instead continue to pay extortion-like settlements to patent trolls who apparently continue to sue alleging infringement of low quality patents.

IP departments are often forced to spend their limited budget defending patent troll lawsuits targeted at the base computing and service layers instead of where it should be spent – protecting application layer innovation. There has been no shortage of such litigation due to the glut of vague and ambiguous software patents directed to basic computing technologies. These broad, vague patents have become glaring targets for trolls, who are eagerly buying them up and asserting them wherever they can. As a result, companies are being sued for patent infringement for things that aren’t directly related to their end products and services.