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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."
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.
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.
The problem is also that the USPO granted the patent in the first place :/
Before you blow your own trumpet too much consider the very bad US example of moving copyright from civil to criminal law which has spread like a cancer around the world. It would be very nice if it went back to Hollywood lawyers suing people instead of SWAT teams through people's windows for copyright violations.
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.