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:but

[jythie]

To be fair, it is how our legal system was crafted. The US has a strong streak of 'handle your own problem, power to control your own fate' to it, and the civil suit system was built to support that. There are lots of crimes which in other countries would be prosecuted by one agency or another (for better or worse) but in the US the only redress one has is a civil suit. Even in situations where there are criminal laws on the books, the complaints about the police not doing anything even when supplied with all the evidence they need are significant. Actually convincing a prosecutor to go forward with your case can be an exercise in frustration.

My favourite sentence

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite sentence from the summary in the first link:

The patent troll's attorney also made the claim that calling someone a 'patent troll' was actually a 'hate crime' under 'Ninth Circuit precedent' and threatened to file criminal charges — unless they settled the civil case immediately, apologized, and gave financial compensation to the troll.

Re:Sounds awesome except....

[msauve]

"you have 2 minutes to review an application written by lawyers paid to write confusing applications."

This.

Patents are supposed to be provided in exchange for an inventor disclosing the invention for future public benefit. But, they're written in such an obtuse manner that they can't be used that way - they're expected to be used to extract money out of the people who come up with something similar, not provide a workable explanation of how to make something useful.

The solution is for examiners to simply outright reject any patent which isn't readily understandable. A person "skilled in the art," shouldn't have to learn deliberately obtuse patent-speak to even begin to understand a patent.