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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.
And the patent troll forgot to include non-disclosure it seems.
Obviously quality lawyering there.. Smart, Real smart.
But lets not forget, Kaspersky is EVIL now remember? EVIL RUSSIANS!
How dare they try and undermine such an upstanding and fine American institution as patent trolling!
Now we know what law firm to go to if we are ever targeted by a patent troll.
I've had a patent troll on my case before and it is one of the most annoying pitfalls of doing business in the USofA. The plaintiff was some invisible company that got ahold of some ARCnet patents from a defunct workstation maker and thought they could nail every Ethernet product maker. We were small potatoes they wanted 3Com and Intel.
Fortunately this particular claim was so specious that it didn't go anywhere. Still annoying.
What's your patent troll story?
Every software patent. If you can't make a good case as to why you should have the patent, it's gone. I think we'd lose 99% of the patents, because 99% of them are bogus.
The name of the inventor on this patent is Steven T. "Trolan".
They're not even subtle about it!
lucm, indeed.
In Russia, patent trolls pay you!
I've long suspected that more than a few patent trolls have paid off the defendants to get out of a suit gone wrong, but always the "settlement" comes with the condition that the defendants not talk about it. What's game-changing about this one is that there's no non-disclosure agreement, Kaspersky's free to publicize exactly who had to pay how much to make the suit disappear. That opens the door for other defendants to counter patent trolls' record of "settlements" (used as evidence of the strength of their claims) with "Show how those "settlements" aren't just like the one with Kaspersky.".
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.
Mostly because its difficult to knock off the patent trolls that nobody wants, without also inadvertently harming the big patent holders such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc who all hold hundreds if not thousands of patents that they don't actually practice in addition to the hundreds or thousands that they do practice.
So you can't just add a law like "non-practicing patents are not actionable" or anything like that without pissing off those big campaign contributors and you end up in kind of an "I know it when I see it" scenario where its usually pretty obvious when someone is a patent troll, but writing it up in legal language that's both strong enough to matter and still specific enough to only harm the abusers.
Of course the real solution is to just not issue shitty patents in the first place, or at the very least be more willing to invalidate them when its shown that they're shitty. That has the same issue of inadvertently harming the big political contributors though so its even less likely to happen since its basically the same solution just kicked up the line a bit.
A Russian company with close ties to KGB exploits a loophole in US patent law, tries to bankrupt a small American firm struggling to make a living out of its intellectual property. The Congress will consider additional sanctions against Russia.
*ahem*
I don't disagree with what you wrote, but you seem to have missed the point.
This is not about non-practising patents. This is about Software Patents, which are utterly immoral and should not exist in any form.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
Other litigation from "payees" which will hopefully put one (of unfortunately many) patent troll out of business. I would also hope that the people bringing fraudulent litigation against companies see at least the threat of criminal charges for fraud.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If all those large patent holders lost their patents at the same time, no one would be harmed.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
At a minimum, software patents do not require revealing the method. If there's no working code, there should be no patent.
International governance regarding patents specifically excludes the granting of a patent for "a formula". Since all software is based entirely on mathematical formulae - which is how computers work - it follows that software is therefore excluded from patent protection on aforementioned grounds.
Note: each time I see the above argument quoted in an internet-based discussion [and not just by me, since this is a widely-held view] there is invariably a response along the lines of, "Wait - when that particular rule was written, the authors did not anticipate the software industry, since computers had not been invented. But really, you know, software should not be excluded like that..." Each time, my response is: "The reading of the relevant rules and agreements that exclude software on the basis that it is simply a sequence of mathematical formulae is no 'more broad' than many of the most vexatious claims made by patent trolls. Put simply - you can't have it both ways..."
...they didn't take this court, win the case, and demand not just their fees and costs (which surely totalled more than $10K) but also asked for a punitive damages amount for this bullshit. That right there would have sent a message to these patent trolls that their particular brand of assholism could end up being costly. Would have been a nice PR boost for Kaspersky to be the ones to back down one of these fools.