alt Hacker NewsJudge's Investigation into Patent Troll Results in Criminal Referrals
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>EFF and two other patent reform groups filed a brief in support of the judge’s investigation.
Nice, it's this kind of involvement in more obscure technical, but very real issues that make me an EFF member.
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It does seem very odd that "someone" can just claim ownership, file a lawsuit, and someone else has to defend themself in the face of a masked accuser whose motives, funding ... and even their own claimed ownership is so obscure that you can't effectively question it.
Good for the judge here for being curious and recognizing this conundrum.
Courts are happy to facilitate obviously malicious parties enriching themselves pursuant to the law at the expense of parties who have done nothing wrong, they call that Tuesday, but they really, really, really don't like when parties mislead them or withhold pertinent information.
The plaintiffs here flew too close to the su. I guess they got cocky after all those years of "legit" patent trolling, lol.
I certainly did not expect the plot twist!
Id love to understand how a french government sovereign investment fund ends up involved in this.
Was the the patent troll (or really, its lawyers) vendor explicitly shopped because of a reputation for playing dirty ?
or if is a case of really, really bad incentives, where the idea was legit...but a rogue actor just took it in an unexpected direction ?
I hope the investigation can go upstream and get this information
The question I keep asking is: why? They give these patents to random people, and 5 or 10% of the proceeds if they win the suits. What do they get out of it?
If they were legit, then I don't see the need to assign the patents they own to someone else before litigating. Unless there's a gotcha, and it's a scam somehow.
Very strange, and just another reason why patents should probably be non-transferrable and "use it or lose it".
A contemporaneous blog post about this case from 2022: https://ipde.com/blog/2022/11/04/a-wild-hearing-chief-judge-...
With a group of legal operators who are that respectable, it couldn't happen to a more deserving firm.
This calls for a round of applause :)
Hopefully they will all achieve the most widespread recognition for every bit of the work they have done over the years.