Posts Tagged: "ray niro"

Ray Niro: “The Administration has become a shill for Google — you even have a Google person running the Patent Office. So you have a situation where any number of patents, tens of thousands of patents, are going to be affected by Alice and also by the Limelight decision on split infringement.”

Recently I interviewed Ray Niro. Our wide ranging discussion touched on all things patent, we first discussed the announcement that Niro, Haller & Niro is now doing patent infringement defense on a flat fee basis. We wrap up our discussion of this new defense business model for the patent litigation industry below. We then transition into a discussion about fee shifting in patent litigation, first discussing the recently failed patent reform and then moving into a discussion of the Supreme Court fee shifting cases from the October 2013 term.

Ray Niro is one of the most well know patent litigators in the country. In some circles is may be referred to as “infamous,” and in other circles he may be simply referred to as famous. It all depends upon whether he is your attorney or whether he is the attorney on the other side… I noticed an announcement that he and his firm are now offering flat fee defense representation in patent litigation matters. Ray Niro defending a patent infringement case? I have to admit I didn’t realize he did defense work, so I wanted to talk to him about this new business model. He agreed.

On July 1, 2013, I spoke on the record with Ray Niro, who is one of the most well known patent litigators in the United States. Throughout his career he has been a champion for the inventor who was facing long odds due to widespread patent infringement. So loathed was Niro, he was the one who was originally referred to as the “patent troll” by the media due to his representing innovators against giant technology companies. Of course, if you are going to call Ray Niro a patent troll you might want to also point out that he is extraordinarily successful, which means he has been very good at proving that large corporations have infringed valid patents, sometimes on fundamentally important innovations.

In June 2013 the anti was raised significantly in the ongoing discussion of patent trolls. The White House chimed in, which you might be inclined to think would be an important development. Sadly the President getting involved in the discussion had more to do with grandstanding than solutions. With all this in the news who better to speak with than Ray Niro, the original “patent troll” according to the media. In our interview Ray unapologetically, and unsurprisingly, comes out in defense of American inventors and those who engage in the hard work that is research and development of new and wonderful innovations. He pulls no punches, and in part 1 of our interview he calls out Cisco, a strong critic of non-practicing entities, as a hypocrite for doing the very thing that they rail against.

The attack on individual inventors using names like NPEs and patent trolls is nearly identical to the attacks previously waged by corporate America on personal injury lawyers, using the McDonald’s hot coffee case as an example of lawyer abuse (now it’s the Wi-Fi patent cases). Like the corporate attacks on everything from the private enforcement of securities fraud claims to unfair business practice, civil rights and age discrimination claims, the new target is patent infringement claims brought by “boogie man” entities that don’t manufacture products.

As far as I am concerned the problem is not generically with patent assertion entities, or even the likes of entities like Acacia Research, or with patent litigators such as Ray Niro. Both engage in comprehensive due diligence before getting involved with a patent owner, turning away more than 99% of what is presented to them for evaluation. Actors like Acacia and Niro seek to enforce good patents that are widely being infringed. Somewhere along the way society has chosen to vilify them and the patent owners they represent as if striving to achieve a patent on an innovation of fundamental importance is evil incarnate. What a sad commentary on the cluelessness of the masses.

Ray Niro responds — There is nothing disingenuous about the licensing and enforcement of the Innovatio IP patent portfolio. Nor is this effort about “forcing quick licensing agreements” on questionable patents. The earliest of the Innovatio patents resulted from the pioneering work of Ronald Mahany and Robert Meier of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1990s. Mahany and Meier are widely considered to be the “Fathers of Radio Frequency Local Area Networking Technology” – commonly referred to as wireless local area networking (“WLAN”) or “Wi-Fi.”

Ray Niro is a nationally recognized trial attorney specializing in the enforcement of patent, trade secret and related intellectual property rights. The name Niro, however, is not like any other in the patent industry. It was as a consequence of a lawsuit one of his clients brought against Intel in 2001 that the term “patent troll” was coined. On March 12, 2012, Niro went on the record with me in an exclusive interview. We discussed many things, including the nearly constant attempts to erode patent rights, make it more difficult for patent owners to seek redress for infringement and what the America Invents Act will mean for patent litigation moving forward. We also discussed the undeniable reality that there are bad actors in the industry.

Raymond P. Niro is patent litigator with tremendous experience and a reputation that is larger than life. To some he is a champion of independent inventors and small business community, frequent clients of his. To others he is nearly the definition of evil. It was as a consequence of a lawsuit one of his clients brought against Intel in 2001 that the term “patent troll” was coined. He has been trial counsel in literally hundreds of intellectual property cases, and since 1996, has won verdicts and settlements for his clients totaling more than $1 billion. On March 12, 2012, he went on the record for this exclusive interview.

I can’t tell you the reason why companies choose to be targets, but I think I have a compelling idea. Those companies that are the ones who complain about patent trolls are also the ones who continually are on Capitol Hill lobbying for patent reform, which in their mind is really only appropriate when it makes issued patents easy to challenge and much more difficult to get. These are the folks who built their corporate empires on patents, growing from small company to mega-giant company while building an enormous intellectual property portfolio heavily dominated with patents that gave them a competitive advantage. Now that they have their market dominant position they really don’t need the patents so much because they have their market power to insulate them from competition, so they want to make it harder for the next individual inventor, start-up tech business or small business to innovate, protect and grow up the corporate food chain.

It seems that Intellectual Ventures, the patent absorbing company founded by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, is starting to head where we all knew they eventually would, which is in the direction of turning to patent litigation against those who are unwilling to cave into their licensing demands. And can you guess who is associated with a current patent litigation where the patent can be traced back to IV ownership? None other than notorious patent troll litigator Ray Niro. You can just hear the Darth Vader music playing in the background, can’t you?