Troll With 'Stupid Patent' Sues EFF. EFF Sues Them Back (arstechnica.com)

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued an Australian company that it previously dubbed as a 'classic patent troll' in a June 2016 blog post entitled: Stupid Patent of the Month: Storage Cabinets on a Computer." An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Last year, that company, Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. (GEMSA), managed to get an Australian court to order EFF to remove its post -- but EFF did not comply. In January 2017, Pasha Mehr, an attorney representing GEMSA, further demanded that the article be removed and that EFF pay $750,000. EFF still did not comply. The new lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, asks that the American court declare the Australian ruling unenforceable in the U.S.
GEMSA's attorneys reportedly threatened to have the EFF's post de-indexed from search engine listings -- on the basis of the Australian court order -- so now the EFF "seeks a court order declaring the Australian injunction 'repugnant' to the U.S. Constitution and unenforceable in the United States."

The Register reports that GEMSA has already sued 37 companies, "including big-name tech companies Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Spotify, and eBay. In each case, GEMSA accused the company's website design of somehow trampling on the GUI patent without permission." But things were different after the EFF's article, according to Courthouse News. "GEMSA said the article made it harder to enforce its patents in the United States, citing its legal opponents' 'reduced interest in pursuing pre-trial settlement negotiations.'"

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Richard_at_work]

Right, and you do realise that the SPEECH act does not matter to the Australian judicial system, right? If its bounced out of the US, the EFF had better hope it never has any funds or assets in Australia, because they will be seized under contempt of court, and contempt of court rulings aren't covered by the SPEECH act even if the contempt is based on an original case which is, so any fines issued under contempt of court *can* be pursued in US courts against its US assets.

The SPEECH act is not a "get out of jail free card", and it does NOT solve the underlying issue - there is a valid court order issued in Australia, and any ruling by a San Francisco court doesn't invalidated it, it just limits the ability to collect under that specific ruling in the US. There are multiple ways around that if the EFF want to ignore the Australian court...

Yes, I've read the SPEECH act (been a few years tho).

virtual cabinets?

[kimvette]

> This month’s stupid patent, US Patent No. 6,690,400 (the ’400 patent), claims the idea of using “virtual cabinets” to graphically represent data storage and organization.

"Magic Desk" for the Commodore 64 (released in 1983) used virtual file cabinets.
So did GEOS applications, IIRC.

Oh hey GEMSA, you want this taken down?

[mrchaotica]

Well too fucking bad, because I'm reposting it instead. COME AT ME BRO!

Stupid Patent of the Month: Storage Cabinets on a Computer

How do you store your paper files? Perhaps you leave them scattered on your desk or piled on the floor. If you're more organized, you might keep them in a cabinet. This month's stupid patent, US Patent No. 6,690,400 (the '400 patent), claims the idea of using "virtual cabinets" to graphically represent data storage and organization. While this is bad, the worse news is that the patent's owner is suing just about anyone who runs a website.

The '400 patent is owned by Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. ("GEMSA") which seems to be a classic patent troll. GEMSA is incorporated in Australia and appears to have no business other than patent litigation. The patent began its life with a company called Flash VOS. This company once offered a product that allowed users to run multiple operating systems on personal computers with x86-compatible processors. The '400 patent describes a graphical user interface for this system. The interface allows users to interact with "graphical depictions of cabinets" that represent memory partitions and different operating systems.

GEMSA says that Flash VOS moved the computer industry a "quantum leap forwarded in the late 90's when it invented Systems Virtualization." But Flash VOS didn't invent partitions, didn't invent virtual machines, and didn't invent running multiple operating systems on a single computer. All of these concepts predate its patent application, some by decades. In any event, the '400 patent claims only a very specific, and in our view, quite mundane user interface.

Importantly, the '400 patent's claims require very specific structures. For example, claim 1 requires "a secondary storage partitions window" and "at least one visible cabinet representing a discrete operating system." A user interface must have all of these features to infringe the claim.

In the past year, GEMSA has sued dozens of companies, ranging from Airbnb to Zillow. In each case, it makes the bare assertion that the defendant's website infringes the '400 patent. For example, it simply states that "AIRBNB maintains, controls and/or operates a website with a graphical user interface ("GUI") at www.airbnb.com that infringes one or more claims of the '400 patent."

GEMSA doesn't explain how Airbnb's website satisfies highly specific claim limitations like "a virtual cabinet representing a discrete operating system." In fact, the accused website bears almost no similarity to GEMSA's supposed invention:

As far as we can tell, GEMSA seems to think that anyone with a website that links to hosted content infringes its patent. Complaints with such sparse, and implausible, infringement allegations should be thrown out immediately for failure to state a claim.

There will be no prizes for guessing where GEMSA has filed its litigation. Every one of its cases was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, where we have long complained that local rules favor patent trolls like GEMSA. Venue reform legislation currently before Congress would stop trolls flocking to the Eastern District of Texas. That might help reduce abusive patent trolling. But we still need broader patent reform to ensure that such weak patents don't lead to abusive troll litigation.

Re:Could you come up with a more biased title?

[hey!]

Title seems to be perfectly accurate to me. This is a "non-practicing entity" -- a piece of legal jargon referring to what is known in the vernacular as a "patent troll". This troll is suing EFF because EFF called one of its patents "stupid" -- and in fact the title duly quotes the term "stupid patent". In logic this is called "reification" -- in essence talking about a statement without necessarily accepting or rejecting its content. You may agree with the statement "Alice called Bob a 'bastard'," without asserting that Bob is a bastard yourself.