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One Man's Battle With Patent Trolls

Posted by samzenpus on from the pay-up dept.

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."

12 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Back under the bridge, troll!! by haruchai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well done, Larry. I hope more developers have a spine as stiff as yours.

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    1. Re:Back under the bridge, troll!! by spamchang · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Make it a class action suit. Demand a list of everyone to whom Dovden has ever sent a threatening letter.

    2. Re:Back under the bridge, troll!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      the point of a class action suit wouldn't be to get everyone rich, it would be to make dovden hurt

  2. Courts should stamp this out by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Courts should stamp this out by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And I'm going to reply to myself. And every lawyer involved in sending these notices should lose their license.

    2. Re:Courts should stamp this out by jamesh · · Score: 5, Informative

      A customer of ours was recently sent an "about to call debt collectors" letter for an invoice for toner cartridges they hadn't bought. The scammer had done their homework - they had called previously claiming to be from the "federal government" doing a survey on printers so they knew exactly what type of toner the customer would have bought. We called the ACCC and were basically told that if money had actually been paid then we could try the feds and see if they would do anything, but otherwise they weren't going to do anything.

      The fact that the scammers were getting away with this sort of shit with basically no risk at all made me quite angry. Stories like TFA make me feel a little better about the world.

    3. Re:Courts should stamp this out by Kaenneth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They got teenagers with quarter ounces of weed to imprision, stop wasting their valuable property seizure time.

    4. Re:Courts should stamp this out by BenfromMO · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Police departments of all stripes can make more money for their departments through property seizure, so why would they waste time with actual criminals which actually costs them money?

      The second we allowed as a society police departments to confiscate individuals' wealth was the second we lost our way as a society. It does not help that tickets and other roadside violations are also money that goes to the local police department directly. And so we have police in this country whose jobs are directly depended on outside revenue streams and so their employers are no longer every citizen, but rather those who they imprison and fine. They are constantly looking for additional people to finance their jobs like that. And what does all of this money that they confiscate give them? Military level arms, body armor, and all sorts of little toys that make breaking into someone's house a quite large ordeal. So next time someone "swats you" you can thank the illegal confiscations and mountains of traffic violations that made it possible for semi-trained idiots to go around with military level machine guns and body armor.

  3. Re:Basic Math... by climb_no_fear · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Re:Can someone explain... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Costs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Basic Math... by sjames · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.