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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.'"
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/23/1347205
"Unlike the other 36 codefendants, Newegg chose to go further and recover its legal fees, an action that most companies choose not to pursue because prevailing defendants were, until recently, required to demonstrate that a plaintiff acted in bad faith."
Silly lawsuits are the American way!
It's well known all around the world.
That's all I've got this morning without coffee.... Thanks I'll be here all week, try the fish!
The Patent troll will probably just declare bankruptcy and reform under a new name, all in the same day.
Not even looking at how it is structured I'd blindly wager that they are held by no fewer than two shell companies. So the problem is that the people pulling the strings never suffer any real repercussions.
The problem is also that the USPO granted the patent in the first place :/
'prototypical exceptional case'
Well which one is it? Prototypical? Or exceptional?
(Like a bad movie) This time it's personal!
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.
and what is the latest news in the prenda soap series ? or has that all quietly been dealt with and they forgot to tell anybody,not heard a whisper in months...
Oh good! So now if some Chinese copycat company with no morals rips off my company's technology and I sue them then they spend 10 million on lawyers and beat my small company, I have to pay that bill for them. Fantastic!
Eliminate "limited liability" for corporations and expect business owners to buy liability insurance instead. There's no limit to the damage they impose on the rest of society, so there should be no limits to our restitution. Take their mansions, their sports cars, and send their kids to public school.
Everyone's so worried about the three-letter organizations. Guess we'd better worry about the four-letter ones (best described using four-letter words).
I knew some guys who had done that three times previously. The fourth time they went for it, the court noticed it and seized everything. Their company went into receivership until the court was able to sell it - patents, inventory and all. The guys pulling this scam lost (after winning huge three times in succession).
How about the tech companies sue the USPTO to recover damages ? That way, the USPTO will be more diligent in their duties. I understand they are understaffed and all, but that is no excuse for granting bogus patents. The best way to stop this scam is to hit USPTO where it hurts - their pocketbook. The USPTO is not a neutral third-party in this dispute.
So even if I'm spending an extra ~$100k to build a 'water neutral' house* that doesn't need a water or sewer connection, I still need the connections to pass inspection?
*I'm either an insanely rich 'green' or disaster prepper.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not a coffee drinker, so I have no real interest in this, but I do remember that many restaurants in my city of the time turned down their serving temperatures to what the plaintiff's lawyers said was a good safe temperature.
Within a day coffee drinkers were screaming at the companies to turn the temperature back up, and there were even public death threats against the grannie.
I don't read AC A human right
How long before Lumen View ask for this to be removed from search engines in Europe?
This could all be fixed by issuing the original patent provisionally, and mandating a second, more thorough review by the patent office when the decorative sabre is first unsheathed.
Maybe the target of the action files an application for second-stage examination and ponies up a small fee on the order of $1000, then the patent office adds the patent to their public "notice of re-examination" board for sixty days to solicit any other public input. After the examination, the target recovers from the patent holder $250 for every claim shot down and another $5000 if the entire patent falls (the patent infringement action could permit the patent holder to exercise only certain claims, so as not to place themselves on the hook for the claim-reversal penalty award on every frivolous claim, but they still owe the $5000 penalty award if claims associated with the infringement action is reduced to the empty set).
Second-stage ratification doesn't need to be a big thing. It only needs to be as big as what the first-stage examination was originally presupposed to accomplish when this whole system was first set up, back when it was possible for a patent examiner to have his or her finger on the pulse of innovation to any extent at all, before human knowledge blue-shifted by a further six orders of magnitude.
To a first approximation, given enough eyeballs, all claims are hollow.
What we really need is a mechanical turk to challenge claims of novel art and claims of application (which should be separated). If the patent holder wished to instigate second-phase examination without filing against an adversary (so as to increase their litigational certitude before uncasking their powder), they would need to post $10,000 as a bounty fund. The public would be invited to submit arguments against any particular claim (much like a bug-tracking system). Maybe there's a $5 fee per hundred words (minimum $5) for each argument filed. The first argument (by filing time) to unseat a claim is awarded a $250 refutation bounty from the bounty fund.
Even better, people are allowed to pay $5 to click "me too". All the "me too" payments are funnelled to the person who originally filed the item (small profit, same day). All parties split the bounty (including the item owner) if that item scores (the incentive to be the fiftieth person to click "me too" is not attractive; by interpolation, the "me too" button functions as a prediction market).
I think we just need to bring a mechanical turk free market processes to bear on the patent approval system, and abuses would soon be dramatically scaled back.
If a company just wants to accumulate patents it could potentially waggle, nothing changes, and all the same press releases can still be penned (mentions of patents pursued would mean less, now being more frail in the waggling, but this is the usual erosion of sense anyone shrewd has long observed).
I'd wager that the judge is fully aware of that and has issued appropriate orders freezing assets until such time as it is determined which assets should actually be seized permanently. This judge DID just rule that Lumen View is a patent troll who is abusing the court system. Judges don't like it when you do that. Three years from now, the people involved might ultimately get their bank accounts released, but the judge knows how to make it an expensive pita to get the order overturned.
When I read this, I thought: "Finally! Shake in fear, patent trolls!"
After 'N' number of times the sleazy lawyers file for bankruptcy using this tactic, the law should be changed so that judge can pierce the corporate veil and go after the directors of the corp personally. This abuse of the protection from legal liability that incorporation affords.
If this had been in force between 1976 and 1988, no one would have dared to expose Ford in the Pinto " death for profit " scheme for fear of Ford extorting huge 'costs' onto the losers.
Loser pays is just another way of insulating the wealthier party in any dispute from any civil justice whatever.
A patent troll falls. Tomorrow it is the old lady GELDED by McD's 210 F coffee who gets screwed over for the last time.
Let's not cheer this more than it is worth. Let's think about what the Supreme Court has just done to civil justice in America.
There are perfectly good ways to nail the patent trolls without this
Any money in becoming a patent troll troll?
I've heard of places like that. Have you looked into a composting toilet and such?
In my area many people either have water trucked in or bring it in themselves via a giant tank in the back of their truck.
How does the septic system get to be that expensive? Having to deal with permafrost?
I don't read AC A human right