09.25.12
Gemini version available ♊︎Trolls in a State of Denial
Summary: Patent trolls do not want to be recognised as patent trolls
Mr. Tiller, a leading figure in Red Hat’s legal team, addresses the fact that patent trolls are a major issue in today’s technology sector. He cites a paper and writes: “A new report titled An Overview of the “Patent Trolls” Debate [PDF] is a balanced but ultimately devastating indictment of “patent trolls.” It was prepared by the Congressional Research Service for members of Congress, who could actually do something about the “troll” problem. It’s a useful primer for those new to the area.
“First, apologies to any who are offended by use of the word “trolls.” As the report points out, the problem is that the term is not only pejorative, but also somewhat vague. It notes the common use of the more polite term “non-practicing entities” (NPEs), but favors using instead “patent-assertion entities” (PAEs). These are entities that speculate by buying patents with a view to asserting them against parties that usually have independently invented, produced, and marketed the technology at issue. I’m fine with “PAE,” which really is clearer, and also points toward an irresistible pun: all a PAE does is make you pay.”
Trolls are a subject that is important to us because trolls used to attack this site and patent trolls we criticise try to discredit, using weasel words and quoting the messenger out of context. As one supporter of this site put it, “While Roy was away on his pre announced honeymoon in Cyprus, a patent troll decided to harass him. They paid for a press release to call him inaccurate, irresponsible and unresponsive. What trash bags.
“Ever heard of Pikigram? Neither has G+ as of this writing, “Sorry, we couldn’t find any matches.” They wrote up a psychobable press release about paradigm shifts breaking the loggjams of innovation with a photosharing app. They have no product or service but hired lawyers who are “pursuing patent protection”. If that’s the sum of their commercial activity, yes they are patent trolls.
“I never imagined a company (sock/troll) would pay for a press release to counter my blog posts,” I wrote in response.
Interesting stuff from the aforementioned thread says: “Here is a promo for the law firm, “legalteamusa”: Zeis, Widerman, & Malek [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LPAoEFOefY]
“They’ve been in business seven years. One of their lawyers created a webpage “IPWatchdog.com” and another called “tacticalIP.com”. They have interesting legal news in their tweets: http://twitter.com/LegalTeamUSA
“Until we can see the patent number to access it and read what it claims are…”
Quoting yours truly out of context and turning out to be connected to the pro-software patents groups/lobby (behind shells) only further validates the original claims against them. Patent trolls are without ethics and all they care about is money, regardless of the means by which to gain it. This is part of a wider issue and it is not only trolls, either. As this one new report puts it: “SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory-chip maker by sales, said Sunday a U.S court imposed sanctions against Rambus Inc. in a patent dispute on dynamic random access memory chips that started in August 2000.
“A Californian court reversed its existing stance and said that Rambus illegally destroyed evidence regarding the patent-infringement case.”
Microsoft and Intel also destroyed evidence.
As a side note of site news, I have been slow to post new articles after I came back because I am testing various Android text editors to replace what I was using on Palm OS. Nothing can replace a physical keyboard; it’s rather horribly slow. █
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