A New Species of Patent Troll

Geoffrey.landis writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, there's a new species of patent troll out there. These new trolls sue companies that sell products with an expired patent number on them. That's right, it's against the law to sell a product that's marked with an expired patent number. The potential fine? $500. Per violation. And some of the companies have patent numbers on old plastic molds that have made literally billions of copies. Using whistle-blower laws, 'anyone can file a claim on behalf of the government, and plaintiffs must split any fine award evenly with it.' You've been warned."

Comments

Editors, please clearly define which side to hate.

[LostCluster]

Who's the troll?

The company that invented the product, got their rightful patent, but their patent rights expired as they should, and is still using old packaging/molds/etc. that display the patent number and are now falsely claiming protection they don't have...

OR...

The lawyer who finds out about this violation of the law, and gets a finder's fee of $250 per product in violation distributed, and raises $250 per product in money for the government who definitely could use some help collecting this fine.

False patent claims can FUD a business away... but we also hate most lawyers here. Editors, please define which side to hate in all arguments. We /. commentators will crash if you execute Story.Comment without the required argument variable "$side".

Wildly Overblown

[Grond]

The emerging case law on this kind of action is putting the damper on a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. First, the potential damages are up to $500 per violation. Courts are not handing down massive damage awards; quite the opposite, in fact. It's likely that most of these cases will end up with damages assessed at some fractions of a dollar or even fractions of a cent per violation. $500 per violation is a cap on damages, not a target.

Second, the courts are setting a fairly high bar for the 'intent to deceive the public' element of false marking. The majority of these cases are the result of typos or failing to retool an assembly line the moment a patent expires.

Re:Editors, please clearly define which side to ha

[Darkness404]

Bullshit.

If a company was really interested in making a product, they'd check the relevant patent numbers online (which is pretty easy to do) and see that they had expired. No company that is /seriously/ interested in a product would simply look at it and give up. The company would certainly look up the patent to try to "get around it" and see that it had expired.

Stop making up scenarios that make no sense.