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Kaspersky Lab Forces 'Patent Troll' To Pay Cash To End Case (arstechnica.com)
In October, Kaspersky Labs was sued by a "do-nothing patent holder in East Texas who demanded a cash settlement before it would go away," reports Ars Technica. Today, founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky said his company has defeated five patent assertion entities, including the infamous claims from Lodsys, "a much-maligned patent holder that sent demand letters to small app developers." The patent-licensing company who sued Kaspersky Labs in October was not only defeated, but they ended up paying Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. From the report: The patent-licensing company, Wetro Lan LLC, owned U.S. Patent No. 6,795,918, which essentially claimed an Internet firewall. The patent was filed in 2000 despite the fact that computer network firewalls date to the 1980s. The '918 patent was used in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation called an "outrageous trolling campaign," in which dozens of companies were sued out of Wetro Lan's "headquarters," a Plano office suite that it shared with several other firms that engage in what is pejoratively called "patent-trolling." Wetro Lan's complaints argued that a vast array of Internet routers and switches infringed its patent. Most companies sued by Wetro Lan apparently reached settlements within a short time, a likely indicator of low-value settlement demands. Not a single one of the cases even reached the claim construction phase. But Kaspersky wouldn't pay up. As claim construction approached, Kaspersky's lead lawyer Casey Kniser served discovery requests for Wetro Lan's other license agreements. He suspected the amounts were low. Wetro Lan's settlement demands kept dropping, down from its initial "amicable" demand of $60,000. Eventually, the demands reached $10,000 -- an amount that's extremely low in the world of patent litigation. Kniser tried to explain that it didn't matter how far the company dropped the demand. "Kaspersky won't pay these people even if it's a nickel," he said. Then Kniser took a new tack. "We said, actually, $10,000 is fine," said Kniser. "Why don't you pay us $10,000?" After some back-and-forth, Wetro Lan's lawyer agreed to pay Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. Papers were filed Monday, and both sides have dropped their claims.
Way to go guys. Every time a troll gets his ass whooped, it's good for the rest of us.
Thanks!
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Trogre asked:
How are software patents still a thing in these backwards jurisdictions?
Article I, section 8 of the U.S. constitution states that, among many other powers granted to it, Congress shall have the power: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Using another power granted to it by Article I, section 8, Congress created the now-voluminous corpus of Federal law known as the U. S. Code. Title 35 of that code - which has been amended several times since its inception - established the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office to administer the Federal grants of exclusive rights to authors and inventors. The duration of those grants is also set by Congress (and has been steadily increased with each revision to Title 35 since the passage of the first Patent Act in 1799). What "inventions" are eligible for patent protection is defined in TItle 35, beginning with section 101.
Whether a patent application is granted or not is determined by patent examiners, who are members of the Patent and Trademark Office staff, and who are assumed to be competent to judge the patent-worthiness of an application. Decisions of patent examiners are subject to challenge - and patents wrongly granted can be recinded - but the process is cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive, so challengers without deep pockets and strong motivation are rare.
Most knowlegeable parties agree the current system is profoundly broken, but, because it's up to Congress to fix it, and a lot of patentholders are also major political campaign finance contributors, nothing fundamental to that system has been seriously revisited in the context of lawmaking in modern times. Nor is it likely to be in the near future.
IANAL ...
Check out my novel.
I do not think GP actually claimed any such a thing. What GP claimed is that the paying for bandwidth may bring some massive improvements for people with money. There is a difference between the two.
That's a misunderstanding of free market economics. A company receiving money has no connection to that company then spending money to improve their service - for a company to spend money there must be an additional incentive to do so.
If a company can simply force Netflix etc. to pay extra to not cripple their service, or force a user to pay extra to not cripple their service, or force users on to their own video service because they've crippled Netflix, and there is no local competitors because of high barriers to entry, then what incentive is there to spend that extra money on improving their service?
Doing so would not generate any extra income, so the free market economics of the situation virtually forbids the company from doing so.
the pain level in the general population has to be high enough to hang he said legislators if they do not do what populace wants. Only this works.
Comcast topped 24/7 Wall St's list of America's most hated companies last year, how much pain do people need to endure? Why should we just shrug our shoulders and let people lie about the situation when there is proof from every other industrialized country that regulation forcing competition in the telecoms sector improves performance and reduces cost to consumers?