Bonum Certa Men Certa

Pen One Acquisition Group is a Patent Troll Indirectly Connected to Microsoft and There's No Simple Solution to Such Problems

Dominion Harbor too is connected to Microsoft and it's hiding behind lots of shells in Texas

Hublink, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary



Summary: The latest example of patent trolls that receive their patents from Microsoft's troll, Intellectual Ventures, and the urgent need for a permanent solution which isn't just Microsoft's 'protection' racket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]

THE USPTO has facilitated patent trolling by saturating the 'market' with lots of low-quality patents -- something which the EPO too is nowadays doing. Cleaning up this mess can take decades. Some trolls have as many as thousands of proxies, e.g. Intellectual Ventures. These proxies, in turn, use their own proxies too, e.g. Dominion Harbor. It's far from trivial tracking who controls who because they register a lot of shells so as to obscure things (see the above diagram which relates to Dominion Harbor's 'enforcers').



"Limiting patent scope (a la Alice) and actively voiding patents accordingly would be ideal."A patent troll tackled by a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes review (IPR) is called "Pen One Acquisition Group," which according to Robert Jain (Unified Patents) is merely a 'proxy' of Equitable, which is led by Dean Becker and remains closely connected to Intellectual Ventures (in turn heavily connected to Microsoft). Here is what Jain wrote this week about something which had happened on Friday:

On August 24, 2018, Unified Patents and Pen One Acquisition Group (an Equitable IP subsidiary and NPE) filed a joint motion to terminate the previously instituted IPR2017-02167 pursuant to settlement. U.S. Patent 7,281,135, the subject of the IPR petition, is directed to an identity verification system.


Sounds like a software patent.

Meanwhile, LOT Network's Seddon was speaking to Watchtroll (he had spoken to IP Watch a couple of years ago). It's what we dubbed "a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" back in May because it's "in effect a reinforcer of the status quo." They market themselves as the answer/solution to trolling and now they claim to have enlisted almost 300 members. From yesterday's article:

Ken Seddon, the CEO and president of LOT Network, told IPWatchdog that members sign the exact same 10-page agreement, which attaches a non-exclusive conditional license to that company’s patents. This license protects other members in the event that one of the patents to which the license is attached ever becomes owned by a patent assertion entity (PAE), thereby preventing the PAE from asserting the patent against LOT Network members.


As we explained at the start of the summer, LOT Network is not the solution to the problem (the same can be said about OIN); the trolls need to actually lose their patents and PTAB is one way for achieving this. Having said that, there are far too many patents out there which trolls actively (but covertly) use for blackmail. Limiting patent scope (a la Alice) and actively voiding patents accordingly would be ideal.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
 
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day