Patent trolls have changed their tactics by going after users according to TechEye. Patent trolls have realized that taking on big companies with large legal teams is a risky prospect so they have started looking for softer targets. Ars Technica is reporting the case of Steven Vicinanza and BlueWave, who received a letter ordering him to pay $1,000 per employee for a license for some “distributed computer architecture” patents.
The blog says the troll in question, “Project Paperless LLC.” claims to have a patent covering the ability to scan documents to e-mail and was demanding money with legal menaces. If BlueWave paid, the troll would have collected $130,000. BlueWave was not the only company the troll went after. Lots of other small and medium companies were being hit.
Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm represented Project Paperless. The attorney told Mr. Vicinanza that if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document the company’s patent covers that process. In other words, any company that used office equipment would have to pay up.
In this case, Mr. Vicinanza decided to fight and beat the troll in court. Despite the victory, TechEye says Project Paperless patents claims are continuing to appear. The troll claims were passed to a network of shell companies. Ars found that the patent threats are going out under at least ten differently named LLCs.
These outfits are sending out hundreds of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. The article says the troll’s royalty demands range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.
Ars Technica reports that Project Paperless has four patents and one patent application it asserts, all linked to an inventor named Laurence C. Klein. “It was a lot of what I’d call gobbledygook,” said BlueWave’s Vicinanza. “Just jargon and terms strung together—it’s really literally nonsensical.”
Ars provides links to the asserted patents, numbers 6,185,590, 6,771,381, 7,477,410 and 7,986,426. AdzPro also notes it has an additional patent application filed in July 2011 that hasn’t yet resulted in a patent. Ars states that the patents may have been useless from a technologist’s perspective, but fighting them off in court would be no small matter. The problem is that it often costs more in legal costs for small businesses to fight the trolls than it does to pay up and make them go away.
Mr. Vicinanza spent $5,000 on a prior art search and sent the results to the Project Paperless lawyers. He filed a third-party complaint against four of the companies that actually made the scanners, Xerox (XRX) Canon (CAJ), HP (HPQ), and Brother (6448). That could have compelled the manufacturers to get involved in the case.
In the end, Hill dropped its lawsuit against BlueWave and went away and the case never came to court. However, Ars points out a detailed website called “Stop Project Paperless,” with information about the patents and links to the Hill, Kertscher, and Wharton law firm.
TechEye concludes that if a firm wants to make a lot of money from a dubious patent, it is better to sue users than the companies which make products that use it. If Apple wanted to kill off Samsung’s business all it would have to do is sue every Android user. Most of them would never go to court and pay whatever Apple demands. That particular scenario is unlikely, but it does show where the antics of patent trolls are headed.
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The politicians tried to work on the problem with the SHIELD Act which I covered here, but that apparently went nowhere. After all, they are too busy driving us all off the fiscal cliff.
Maybe it was top troll Apple that stopped the law from getting a full House vote, Apple is now the biggest patent troll of them all.
So more proof that Patent Trolls Cost the US $29 Billion which I covered earlier.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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