Patent Troll Lawyer Sanctioned Over Extortion Tactics

An anonymous reader writes "For all the stories of patent trolls and copyright trolls, there haven't been too many stories of either being sanctioned for abusive or extortion-like practices... until now. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (one level below the Supreme Court) has approved over $600,000 in sanctions against a lawyer for a patent troll, saying that filing over a hundred lawsuits, each of which was followed up almost immediately with offers to settle at fees much cheaper than it would cost to fight, has the 'indicia of extortion.' Now if only judges started doing that more often."

Comments

Precedent Against RIAA

[Jason Levine]

The RIAA has been using similar tactics only with copyright instead of patent. They file a bunch of John Doe lawsuits, get the people's names, contact them and say "Hey, you can settle with us for a low, low (but not too low) fee or we will sue you for a ton of money." Of course, this patent troll isn't as big as the RIAA is, so the chance that they would be found to be extorting money out of alleged infringers is much lower.

Re:Now We Wait ...

[gstoddart]

The Supreme Court might decide that extortion which is asking for an agreement not to pursue a known legal right--i.e. suing you--is perfectly legal.

Well, if nobody has decided on the merits of the case, but you're immediately providing an offer to settle which is lower than likely legal fees ... I fail to see how this is anything but extortion.

What's to stop this lawyer from filing suit against a bunch of people who you have no evidence against whatsoever? In this case, and from TFA:

In this particular case, it was clear that Flagstar did not infringe on the patents in question. ... snip ...

In addition to finding that Eon-Net filed an objectively baseless infringement action, the district court also determined that Eon-Net filed the lawsuit in bad faith and for an improper purpose... In particular, the district court found that Eon-Net's case against Flagstar had "indicia of extortion" because it was part of Eon-Net's history of filing nearly identical patent infringement complaints against a plethora of diverse defendants, where Eon-Net followed each filing with a demand for a quick settlement at a price far lower than the cost to defend the litigation.

So, this is a completely baseless suit, with an immediate offer to settle, and with NO legal grounds for the suit in the first place.

You may not have read the actual legal case, but seriously, RTFA and you might know why this is happening. These filings were completely meritless, and the offer to settle was intended to exploit the cost of litigation being more than the cost of settling.

This is a case where the lawyer definitely needed to be sanctioned