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One Man's Battle With Patent Trolls
farrellj writes "Dovden Investments, labelled as a Patent Troll by many, got more than they bargained for when they went after Ottawa developer Larry Dunkelman. Mr. Dunkelman wrote BusBuddy, an app that takes GPS and scheduling data from OC Transpo, the local city bus service, and predicts when the bus you are waiting for will actually arrive. But when Dovden came along and asked for $10,000, as a 'licensing' fee, Dunkelman got angry, and decided to fight. 'They claim to have patented the method of using GPS location on vehicles to determine when they will arrive at a certain place,' Dunkelman said. 'This applies to buses, package delivery, airplanes, trains - any business that employs a fleet of vehicles in which they track their location to arrive at a certain place, is open to this patent troll.' Dunkelman hired an intellectual property lawyer and started chipping away at the company's claims. Dovden has since discontinued the suit and are now being chased by Dunkelman and his lawyer for legal costs."
Well done, Larry. I hope more developers have a spine as stiff as yours.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Dovden asked for $10,000. There was probably only a 1 in 1000 chance someone would fight and win. Dovden knew for certain that their patent wasn't innovative; this was no honest misunderstanding. Any damages less than $10000 * 1000 = $10,000,000 makes this a profitable business model.
Any ruling fining Dovden less than $10,000,000 is not enough.
Does he have a donation box? I've donated to causes much less worthy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Any lawyer who aids a patent troll ought to be disbarred.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
What you are looking for here is something related to barratry. I wish such a concept actually applied in U.S. federal courts, although there are several states that have become enlightened enough that it does apply to those state court systems.
Even more important, I wish judges would actually enforce such a concept and disbar those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, in the "real world" you don't tend to find things so clear cut and lawyers being complete jerks. Usually they know at what point they are going to cross over the line and try to stay on the proper side of that line, even if they may tend to push those limits from time to time. It takes a real idiot of a lawyer who doesn't know the laws of their own profession.
I dunno, if a saber-toothed tiger was chasing you, you probably cared a great deal about your arrival time at the nearest climbable tree or such.
Yes. The system is horribly broken.
I suggest a fix: Every patent you are granted is free. Every patent that you are denied costs you. The cost is a sliding scale, the faster the patent office finds a triviality, or previous art, the more it costs the customer. The pantent office has to give the reasons why the patent was rejected, along with the bill. This should a) give the patent office some money, b) reduce the patentload, which means more time per patent for patent office. This creates a balance; patent office has to reject shittty patents to get money, but they have to keep granting good patents, orherwise people will stop filing (which might be a win for society in itself), and they are out of a job.
Serious answer here, IAAL in Canada. Yes, in Ontario the losing side pays costs to the winning side. However, "costs" is awarded according to procedures in the court rules, and it doesn't actually represent the literal legal costs of the winning party. Court awarded "costs" usually end up being around a third of actual legal costs, but it's still a penalty for the loser. Going by the summary (haven't read the original article yet), I imagine that Dovden will oppose costs because they unilaterally discontinued the action before the court could dismiss the action with costs awarded against them. A plaintiff discontinuing its action is usually seen by defendants as a good thing, so normally costs aren't awarded in these cases.
Only relatively speaking. Nobody much cared whether they became tiger poop at 4P.M or 5P.M. but arriving at the climbable tree before the tiger was of great interest.