For years, the Eastern District of Texas was the favored stomping ground for patent trolls. Short times from filing to trial, shorter trials, judges with local rules friendly to patent plaintiffs, and a jury pool that tended to be friendly to plaintiffs all contributed to this. It probably didn’t hurt that Eastern District judges were…
Tag Archive for patent trolls
GNOME Slays Troll
by Josh Landau •
Last year, Patent Progress reported on a troll targeting the GNOME Foundation, a major open source coordinating entity. Despite Director Iancu’s public statement claiming that trolls are a myth, this troll was very real. In fact, it was one of the Rothschild NPEs, one of a plethora of companies Leigh Rothschild has used in nearly…
Patents in the Time of Coronavirus
by Josh Landau •
Most of the time, the patents I cover involve investment in technology and who gets how much money. Innovation is important, but the patent lawsuits I write about usually don’t directly threaten public health and welfare. Usually. Today’s a little different. Earlier this week, Mike Masnick at Techdirt reported on what might be the single…
Troll U: When Tech Transfer Stops Being About The Transfer
by Josh Landau •
When a university acquires patents without any tie to the university or attempt to transfer technology via startup creation and then asserts those patents, how can you tell the difference between a university and a patent troll?
Blackbird Grounded—For Now
by Josh Landau •
Almost two years ago, I wrote about a new non-practicing entity (NPE)—Blackbird Technologies. It claimed to be helping innovators, but the main innovation it helped promote was its own—having the lawyers own the patents on which Blackbird was suing. When I first wrote about Blackbird, it had just sued Cloudflare over the ‘335 patent, which…
NPEs Continue To Leave Their (Land)mark On Small Businesses
by Josh Landau •
The reports of the death of the patent troll are greatly exaggerated. Alive and well, they continue to have a real impact on small and medium-sized U.S. businesses (SMEs). Azure Standard Pretend you run an organic farm. You start selling your products online, and people like them. You can expand a bit, hiring more people.…
Multiple Petitions? More Like Multiplicative Claiming And Assertion
by Josh Landau •
One of the criticisms frequently leveled against inter partes reviews (IPRs) is that people file multiple IPRs; they file two, three, four IPR petitions in order to harass a patent owner. Complaints notwithstanding, the data shows just how infrequent a practice this is. The data also shows that the blame for the occasions when this…