At trial in East Texas Cheng took the stand to tell Newegg’s story. Alcatel-Lucent’s corporate representative, at the heart of its massive licensing campaign, couldn’t even name the technology or the patents it was suing Newegg over.
via Newegg nukes “corporate troll” Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year | Ars Technica.
This is big win #2 in recent times for Newegg. Here’s their win against the shopping cart patent.
VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer’s letter from BT, which has kicked off a taxing licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents.
via BT unleashes SIP licensing troll army • The Register.
A useful comment from slashdot.
The IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) Working Group started working on Session Protocols [ietf.org] in 1993.
Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10 [columbia.edu]), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).
I don’t see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C [btplc.com]) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.
I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.
Rackspace is being sued over its Rackspace Cloud Notes app for iOS, in a lawsuit that also includes claims again several other Texas companies, including Petroleum Geo-Services, PlainsCapital Bank, Texas Instruments, Schlumberger Technologies, and energy giant TXU. All of those companies have iOS apps which, apparently, rotate their screens.
via Rackspace goes on offense against second patent troll in two weeks | Ars Technica.
Rackspace’s dispute is with an IP Nav unit called Parallel Iron, which says it has three patents that cover the open source Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). But remarkably, Rackspace didn’t even know that at first; IP Nav contacted Rackspace and told the company it infringed some patents while refusing to even reveal the numbers or the owners of the patents, unless Rackspace signed a “forbearance agreement” to not sue first. (Sometimes companies threatened by patent trolls can file a “declaratory judgment” lawsuit, which can help them win a more favorable venue.)
via Rackspace sues “most notorious patent troll in America” | Ars Technica.
Uniloc USA, Inc. filed the complaint against Rackspace in June 2012 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. The complaint alleged that the processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system violated U.S. Patent 5,892,697. Rackspace and Red Hat immediately moved to dismiss the case prior to filing an answer. In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc’s claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter. In the ruling released today, Judge Davis wrote that the asserted claim “is a mathematical formula that is unpatentable under Section 101.”
via Rackspace, Red Hat Win Decisive Patent Victory (NYSE:RHT).
VirnetX sued Cisco, Apple, NEC and others back in 2010, and it won over $368 million from Apple earlier this year. It also has separate litigation pending against Apple and Mitel Networks.
via Cisco beats patent holder VirnetX, which sought $258 million over VPN patent | Ars Technica.
Few, if any, of the defendants make their own mapping software. Move.com, for instance, uses maps provided by Microsoft’s Bing. But patent laws allow a patent-holder to sue anyone who makes, sells, or uses a patented item. In this case, it’s the real estate companies, together with their users, who are alleged to be “jointly infringing” the patent.
via Gone house hunting online? Revived patent lawsuit says you’re a “joint infringer” | Ars Technica.
Innovatio deliberately avoided targeting the actual manufacturers of Wi-Fi equipment, preferring to sue end-users. But in October, Cisco, Netgear, and Motorola teamed up to file an 81-page lawsuit [PDF] seeking to shut down Innovatio’s patent-trolling project once and for all. Not only were the patents invalid, but the suit alleged Innovatio’s whole campaign was a violation of the RICO anti-racketeering law. That law is more commonly used against crime families than patent holders.
via Wi-Fi patent troll hit with racketeering suit emerges unscathed | Ars Technica.
Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.
via How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail | Ars Technica.
The first patent troll story of the new year. I like Newegg. If I didn’t live so close to a brick and mortar Microcenter I’d probably use them a lot.
Vicinanza soon got in touch with the attorney representing Project Paperless: Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm.
“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”
via Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners | Ars Technica.
Smaller and smaller companies are being targeted. In a paper on “Startups and Patent Trolls,” Prof. Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University found that 55 percent of defendants to patent troll suits are small, with less than $10 million in annual revenue. Even in the tech sector, a full 40 percent of the time, respondents to patent threats are being sued over technology that they use (like scanners or Wi-Fi) rather than their own technology.
From: http://stop-project-paperless.com/
Drew Curtis, CEO of Fark.com was sued for infringing on a patent that claimed to cover sending press releases out via email. He made a short five minute video describing how he beat them. You can find here: http://on.ted.com/Bxwq