Patent Troll Ordered To Pay For the Costs of Fighting a Bad Patent

We mentioned last year that FindTheBest CEO Kevin O'Connor had taken an unusual step, when confronted with a demand by patent troll company Lumen View that the startup pay $50,000 for what struck O'Connor as a frivolous patent: He not only refused, but pledged to spend a million bucks, if necessary, to fight Lumen View in court. Now, as Ars Technica reports, O'Connor has succeeded on a grand scale. Before trouncing Lumen View in court, Ars reports, "FindTheBest had spent about $200,000 on its legal fight—not to mention the productivity lost in hundreds of work hours spent by top executives on the lawsuit, and three all-company meetings. Now the judge overseeing the case has ruled (PDF) that it's Lumen View, not FindTheBest, that should have to pay those expenses. In a first-of-its-kind implementation of new fee-shifting rules mandated by the Supreme Court, US District Judge Denise Cote found that the Lumen View lawsuit was a 'prototypical exceptional case.'"

Comments

Re:Sounds awesome except....

[fuzznutz]

That is part of the reason that these 'looser pays' rules make me nervous..

Would you feel better if it was 'tighter pays'?

Re:Newegg did that too?

[rmdingler]

Per Slashdot's unwritten rule, and there are more of them than in baseball, a poster may be generously moderated for jumping on the grenade that is reading the flocking article.