Heroic father of the steam engine, or manipulative patent troll?
Posts Tagged ‘patent trolls’
January 15 roundup
- Judge Posner’s patience snaps in a class action: the case “is an example of the typical pathology of class action litigation, which is riven with conflicts of interest… The lawyers for the class could not concede the utter worthlessness of their claim because they wanted an award of attorneys’ fees.” Complete with a quotation from Leo Rosten about chutzpah [Mirfasihi v. Fleet Mortgage Corporation; NMC @ Folo, Courthouse News and again]
- Erosion of mens rea prerequisite in criminal law should alarm all of us across left-right lines [Doug Berman on John Hasnas WLF paper]
- “Federal drain law forces pool closings” [Boston Globe]
- Gambling habit was no excuse for Woodbridge, Va. lawyer to forge clients’ signature on lawsuit settlements which he pocketed; Stephen Conrad drew a 11-year sentence after doing $4 million damage to clients. Also in Virginia, former Christiansburg attorney Gerard Marks pleaded guilty Nov. 13 to forgery [Va. Lawyers Weekly; earlier here, and, on Marks, first links here]
- Plaintiff family in Anaheim, Calif. police-shooting lawsuit have an unusual demand: that statue of deceased victim be put up on Disneyland’s Main Street [Orange County Register]
- Connecticut state lawyer who assumed bogus identity to send anonymous letter that got her boss fired, then claimed whistleblower protection, is let off with reprimand and nine hours of ethics training [Schwartz, earlier]
- “Patent troll sues Oprah, Sony over online book viewing” [The Register; Illinois Computer Research, Scott Harris, etc.]
- JetBlue incident at JFK: “240,000 dollars awarded to man forced to cover Arab T-shirt” [AFP/Yahoo, Raed Jarrar]
New Character Class Coming to your Favorite Games: The Patent Troll
A Massachusetts company known as Worlds.com, which to my knowledge has never produced a product of the sort known as a “Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game,” nevertheless claims a patent in the concept. These games, the best known of which are probably World of Warcraft or Everquest, have been around for well over ten years, and are quite the moneymaking ventures for their producers.
Now Worlds.com is suing NCSoft, a Korean company that produces the games Lineage and City of Heroes, based on a patent filed in 1999 and issued in 2004 for a “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space,” though some of the NCSoft games alleged to breach the patent were produced before Worlds.com even filed its application. As Words.com has never produced such a game, and appears to be little more than a vehicle for holding the patent, one expects that NCSoft will counterclaim seeking to invalidate the patent. Nevertheless, Worlds.com announces that it would “welcome licensing inquiries from the on-line game industry,” meaning Sony and Blizzard, to allow those companies to continue making money from their own games.
The best story I could find on this came from The Register, which has the application and notes that the patent is an “extremely broad” one which could reach beyond games. Other informative coverage can be found at gaming sites, including Broken Toys, Kotaku, and Virtual World News.
December 9 roundup
- Go vote for Overlawyered now, please, in the ABA Journal best-blogs contest; some details on contestants in other categories;
- Update on “Got Breastmilk?” trademark dispute [Giacalone; earlier]
- Trauma patient is bleeding while you fumble to get the IV equipment out of its blister pack. Soon it’ll be even more complicated. Thanks OSHA! [Throckmorton] And where are the stand-up medical comedy routines?
- Arkansas Supreme Court’s handling of school finance litigation suggests it’s making it up as it goes along [Jay Greene]
- “Linux Defenders” is tech-firm consortium’s new effort to create “no-fly zone” protecting open-source system from patent trolls [Parloff, Fortune]
- Zero tolerance roundup: 10 year old who took $5.96 Wal-Mart cap gun to school arrested, fingerprinted, faces expulsion [11alive.com, Newton County, Ga.] Harford County, Md. mom, acting as chaperone on school field trip, “reached out to tap” third grader to shush him, now faces ten years if convicted of assault [ABC2News.com, Baltimore] Related: we’re too afraid of touch [Times Online] Teasing is bad for children and other living things. Really? Are you sure? [Althouse, NYT]
- Columnist has opposed bailouts and favored free market liquidation of uneconomic firms. Now that his newspaper faces bankruptcy, has he changed his mind? [Steve Chapman]
- Good way to suffer reputational damage: file a lawsuit claiming characters in movie “Dazed and Confused” were based on your own teenage selves [four years ago on Overlawyered]
Troll trips up: SCO told to pay Novell $2.5 million
Bankrupt SCO Group Inc., much loathed for its (sometimes successful) efforts to extract copyright royalties from users of the open-source Linux system, has suffered another humiliating defeat in a Utah federal courtroom. The court proceedings determined, among other things, that SCO didn’t in fact own the copyrights it claimed to own, and had breached its fiduciary duty under an earlier agreement with Novell. (Ars Technica, Information Week, GrokLaw). At the height of SCO’s notoriety, the high-profile law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner was pursuing its anti-Linux claims on contingency. Earlier here, here, and here. [Update Sept. 18, 2009: in dramatic reversal, 10th Circuit, McConnell writing, reinstates SCO’s suit; Boies firm still representing SCO. See WSJ Law Blog, 8/25/09]
In other news, progress is being made on a scheme of “defense patent aggregation”; an outfit called the RPX Corp., with subscriptions from large technology-using companies, aims to buy up (presumably lower-value) patents to keep them out of the hands of trolls (WSJ Law Blog).
“Lawyer Seeks Patent on Form of Patent Trolling”
Sometimes a headline, and the story behind it, just makes our day. (Elefant channeling Patently-O). Given that the “inventor Clive D. Menezes is a Halliburton patent attorney”, and Halliburton as a big industrial company has presumably gotten shaken down by patent trolls many times in the past, it seems to have taken some of the commenters at Patently-O a while to catch on as to possible satirical intent.
Update: Or maybe not precisely satirical intent: Halliburton has issued a statement saying that it “has no intention of applying the technique offensively. Rather, Halliburton intends to use any patent that may issue from this application defensively to discourage entities that engage in such tactics.” (AmLaw Daily).
Microblog 2008-11-01
- Australia joins Axis of Internet Censorship [The Australian h/t Mike Elgan; Volokh] #
- Circa-1900 neighborhoods with porches are my favorite for trick-or-treating. #
- “Our companies have been spending 100s of 1000s of dollars per case fighting off patent trolls” [A VC, h/t Pete Warden] #
We’re all lawyers. We don’t have to answer questions.
Not like you manufacturing defendants who are going to have to hand over your hard disks’ contents to us because you’re mere non-lawyers. “If a company’s sole business is licensing and litigating patents, plus it’s run by lawyers, what isn’t protected by privilege?” A subsidiary of patent holding firm Acacia is appealing a judge’s ruling denying some of its broad privilege claims. (Zusha Elinson, “IP Case Tests Boundaries of Privilege”, The Recorder, Oct. 20).
September 30 roundup
- Trips over firefighter’s bag at rescue scene, now wants cash from city [Salem, Mass., News]
- Oh, my: “Bidens owe SimmonsCooper [huge mass tort firm in Madison County, Ill.] $1 million in hedge fund deal” [MC Record, earlier] Update: plenty more in a Wednesday WSJ editorial.
- Florida Supreme Court rejects latest attempt by attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley to resist discipline [North Country Gazette]
- “Women’s advocacy groups have persuaded Congress to begin intensive Title IX equity reviews of science programs.” Bad news for American academic science [Sommers, AEI/Teachers College Record]
- You may have run into everyone’s favorite fashion law blog. But did you know there’s also a furniture law blog? [Womble Carlyle; via Blawg Review #179 at Securing Innovation]
- Eavesdrop on jury deliberations, get wind of defense verdict, move quick to settle case? That would be a very naughty thing for a lawyer to do [American Justice Partnership]
- Myrhvold the last straw: “Up until now I have been criticized in many corners for taking the side of so-called patent trolls. …No tax policy could ever do as much damage to an economy.” [Gene Quinn, PatentFools.com, also via above]
- Okay, towns, build sidewalks or else [four years ago on Overlawyered]
Nathan Myrhvold’s trollery?
The Wall Street Journal takes a critical look (Amol Sharma and Don Clark, “Tech Guru Riles the Industry By Seeking Huge Patent Fees”, Sept. 17). Via Felix Salmon who adds,
Intellectual Ventures and its ilk are arguably the single biggest risk to America’s continued leadership in technology and innovation. As dsquared elegantly put it in a comment here in May, the company might do a bit of R, but it doesn’t do any D. Instead, it acts as a brake on any company wanting to do substantive R&D of its own, since there’s a good chance Intellectual Ventures will have got there first, patented the idea, and then just decided to sit on it until somebody dares to violate it.