I Beat A Patent Troll And You Can Too
Posted by Zenphamy 9 years, 7 months ago to Technology
So, I responded to their demand that we pay up or shut down with this:
Without knowing anything about the legitimacy of either side of this particular patent battle, I found this story pretty amusing as well as a good Objectivist lesson.
"Dear Piece of Sh*t,
We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response.
I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient,
Chris
While my wording may have been extreme, the message got through. Needless to say, we quickly found ourselves in federal court. They asked to settle, and I told them my offer was $0 and they would need to license their entire patent portfolio to all other startups, or we would go on the offensive and invalidate their entire intellectual property portfolio"
Without knowing anything about the legitimacy of either side of this particular patent battle, I found this story pretty amusing as well as a good Objectivist lesson.
"Dear Piece of Sh*t,
We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response.
I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient,
Chris
While my wording may have been extreme, the message got through. Needless to say, we quickly found ourselves in federal court. They asked to settle, and I told them my offer was $0 and they would need to license their entire patent portfolio to all other startups, or we would go on the offensive and invalidate their entire intellectual property portfolio"
I had already found what I knew about all the parasites out there to be very disturbing.
This is a whole new additional division of evil people I up until now did not know about.
All the more disturbing. Like there's a huge horde of mosquitoes out there.
It brings into question the view that people in general are essentially good.
"There was one particular thing that kept coming back, and it was the attorneys for Life360 who kept saying, one single player had to perform all the acts," said Coombs. "We just weren't convinced Life360 did that."
You can be guilty of contributory infringement. Think of a near beer potion with a packet of yeast that says don't mix these.
The question is whether Life360 really is interested in an honest patent system or they want a head they win, tails they lose, like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.
Check out woodlema's post below.
I read it four hours after he posted here.
This past weekend I had a phone call from 360-761-1155. they claimed to be with the IRS and were demanding payment for a 2008 - 2012 tax issue. While I did have a 2008 - 2012 issue this was fully resolved. I asked for their employee id's. told them I would get back to them. I called back got another person who used another name and ID number, totally wrong number of digits for an IRS employee. I traced the call to its source in the state of Washington the owner and address, called the local police, called and emailed the IRS< called and emailed the FBI with a TON of information I collected. When I call that number now all I get is busy signal...I guess they blocked me. BTW I just called them again. I do this to EVERY call I get that is a fraud. GOD help the one that tries this on me that is within 4 hours driving distance. They will receive a personal visit from me and "Wembly" or me and my "BFR."
The ONLY way to deal with bullies is to do exactly what you did, then step it up a bit, and if lucky, they will no longer contribute to the CO2 issues of this planet, and you can consider yourself a good steward of the planet.
This IRS threat scam is very common and has unfortunately fooled a lot of people into paying thousands of dollars, probably because the scam so well fits the character of the IRS that it sounds plausible.
Honest or not, telemarketers are required to check their phone lists against the national list of those who have signed up on the 'do not call' list to not be harassed, but they routinely ignore it. Local police do nothing about these telephone scams and the FTC is slow to go after violators of the 'do not call' list, but you can sign up for the NoMoRobo service, which works with most telephone carriers like an anti-spam blacklist and reporting system: http://www.nomorobo.com/ It's a lot easier than trying to track them down yourself.
Nomorobo intercepts your incoming calls in parallel with your own telephone. It the source is on the blacklist your phone rings once and stops. If a spam caller gets through, you submit the caller ID number to Nomorobo for future blocking and automatic repeat reporting to the FTC.
With this system and reporting for new harassers we now get get dramatically fewer spam calls -- including elimination of the repetitious IRS threat scam Woodlema described. Like email spammers who avoid targets who report them to blacklists, the phone scammers seem to be doing their own filtering to stay out of trouble and mostly leave you alone when they figure out that you are defending yourself, even when they otherwise ignore the 'do not call' list.
Jan
Until there is some REAL tort reform that address the frivolous and the outright fraudulent cases providing some significant penalty for fraud, I seriously question just about any claim made, especially when it does not pass the smell test. I just got 50 million today and tomorrow I am getting sued. The smell test is a good gauge, and common sense is generally pretty accurate..
CTYankee poses an interesting conundrum. Looking for infringement that is justified...possibly. think about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, and the guy who invented texting.
Or how Microsoft outright STOLE the methods from Digital Equipment to make Windows NT clustering work. All legitimate.
But when someone is using vague, subtle ways to sue, when there is no real connection, especially when the first course of action is to sue, that is when I question things seriously.
The "Troll" in the example above, would have been much better served by directly approaching Chris and discussing their perception of the perceived infringement. Probably could have avoided the entire court battle. But when you look at the guy, big mansion no employees, just a holding company and a layer on retainer. Smells like troll to me.
Example 1 has to be the plaintiffs in SCO v. Linux, as well as a certain billionaire competitor who everyone knows was bankrolling them.
If you want evidence and/or examples, start at eff.org or publicknowledge.org.
Let's start with some other facts. The richest, most free, and the most technological advanced and the countries that create the overwhelming bulk of new technologies have the strongest patent laws. When you have some real facts come back.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/st...
Go ahead. Tell us with a straight face that this company deserves the payments it bullies other companies into making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM...
My clients have been on both sides of these situations. Luckily, most of my clients have tried to be reasonable. In one case, the attorney on the other side refused to even discuss why they thought my client infringed and basically asked if we were willing to risk the cost of litigation. Note this is really a problem with the legal system generally and has nothing to do with patents specifically. Basically the attorney on the other side knew that the law is often an expensive crap shoot in court and his client was willing to play chicken with a million dollars. This is done in med malpractice suits, product liability suits, securities lawsuits, and a favorite tactic of many federal prosecutors and federal agencies. Don't blame patents, blame the absurdly expensive, ambiguous legal system we have.
In the case of patents, the Supreme Court has gone out of their way to increase the uncertainty in patent lawsuits with their absurd opinions. Thus a bully is always willing to use this ambiguity in their favor. Whether you are a defendant or a plaintiff, be willing to stick your ground (within broad economic costs benefits) if you are sure you are right. That makes the system honest and deters bullies.
This does not prove that the plaintiff was necessarily unreasonable in asserting the patents however.
I remained firm even with a lot of shin kicks under the settlement conference tables from my attorneys for my oral responses (not written), and eventually the agencies caved in both cases. It cost quite a bit of money, but the settlement offers set precedence that offered future harm to my company and several others nationwide working in my field, which had ben the entire intent of bringing the actions. So my empathy lies with the guy being charged and I don't intend that there is any similarity between this case and mine.
My argument is not against patent law or honest actions, its the misuse of the system.
The legal system is a mess and it is absurd to suggest that patents are anywhere near the top of any list of things that need to be reformed.
The difference between us is that, having spent decades in the software industry, I know that huge numbers of patents which have no business to be issued are issued anyway. Thus, I expect anyone claiming to collect on patent rights -- especially if he didn't make the invention himself and doesn't produce a product other than litigation -- to bear the burden of proof that his patent (1) is valid and (2) is broad enough that the defendant has actually infringed.
There you go. Injecting reason into a feeling world. :)
Nice story, well-related to the timely issue of bully-busting. It beautifully encompasses the problem of patent trolls and their effect on startups.
@dbhalling, you challenged me recently to produce evidence of poor-quality patents being used to bully software developers. Here you go, this is exactly what I was talking about from the outset.
Wink-wink I couldn't resist! :^)
Go to http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/wha... and look at the photoshopped picture at the top.
Notice that it has NO copyright watermark, while the two 'halves' it was made from do.
I put the false one on my website and got an email from a law firm in NY demanding hundreds of dollars versus a 'we'll take you for every penny you're worth' lawsuit if I didn't pay up.
Startled, frightened and new to the game, I paid up. About a year later, they wrote again on the same subject, LONG after I'd removed the offensive photo, and I immediately wrote back that if they were trying to hit me again, I WOULD see them in court!
They replied that the second attack was in error and that the 'original issue had been closed.'
Now, keep in mind that I made NO income or royalty from the photoshopped picture and I had copied the picture down from Snopes . com, which posts THEIR copy of it without watermark either.
The link to the 'artist' is available, and I put it on my site's page where the photo had appeared... at http://www.plusaf.com/no-its-not/_no-its... scroll down about half the page to see where the photo had been....
I offered to pay them any and all profits I'd made from the existence of that photo on my website, but they weren't interested in a check for fucking Zero Dollars.
Life in the good old USA...
1. The guy had just gotten money for his company.
2.Some clown collection with no staff, and a mansion in Fla preys on such situations, after having bought as many little useless patents as they could so that anything related to a pancake (such as butter) is an infringement.
3.They had some shark bait lawyers who they probably have a deal with to share the profits so they don't have to pay the ridiculous hourly fees
4. They knocked their little peckers in the dirt, taking minor damage in return.
Having sued my dumb ass neighbor with 275 alpacas on 3 acres and never picked up any manure in 3 years for a nuisance, and getting 138 K in awards (which now I am blowing more money on a useless BK attorney after he fraudulently filed), I can sympathize with the whole thing.
This is just another form of looting. Imagine GM suing Galt because he made an engine. That is where I see this mess. Good for them!
I tangled with him on this some time ago.
There has to be some way to bring the legal system as a whole back to it's intended functions, but to a large extent those within that system have taken over the legislative and even a good chunk of the bureaucratic systems as well.
"I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient"
Words as weapons....
um now we will bring the reality....
Jan. poetically inclined