10.04.17
Microsoft-Connected Patent Trolls Continue to File New Lawsuits and Collect Patents for Further Litigation Purposes
One has to be willfully blind not to see it
Summary: Microsoft’s strategy of passing patents to trolls and pressuring rivals into paying for ‘protection’ carries on; at the same time, Microsoft pays critics and potential critics for their silence while simultaneously passing money for officials in Munich to abandon GNU/Linux and bolster the case against GNU/Linux adoption in desktops
THE patent aggressor known as Microsoft continues to praise itself for supposedly “loving” all sorts of things, including the very things that it’s attacking, usually indirectly. Not too surprisingly, Microsoft-connected patent trolls are busy attacking Microsoft’s competitors but never Microsoft itself. Therein lies Microsoft’s existing strategy. They derive leverage from patent blackmail and the perceived protection from it (e.g. for those who pay Microsoft monthly rents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]). The mainstream media does not want to cover any of this, not because there’s lack of evidence but because there’s an abundance of agenda (currently, the paid-for agenda is posting pictures with hearts in them, e.g. “Microsoft loves Linux).
A day or two ago Juniper became the latest victim of the Microsoft-connected Finjan, a patent troll that maybe had a real business over a decade ago. Now it’s just a litigation machine whose very own staff seems to be fed up (trolling is nothing to take pride in).
Finjan carries on suing the whole world (except Microsoft) with patents and this new press release takes stock of companies that did not shell out ‘protection’ money (and are thus sued):
Finjan has pending infringement lawsuits and appeals against FireEye, Inc., Symantec Corp., Palo Alto Networks, Blue Coat Systems, Inc., ESET and its affiliates, Cisco Systems, Inc., SonicWall, Inc., and Bitdefender and its affiliates relating to, collectively, more than 20 patents in the Finjan portfolio
Finjan is far from the only instance of such abusive litigation. Consider Dominion Harbor, which is connected to Microsoft's biggest troll, Intellectual Ventures. Well, as one might expect, it is at it again. They harvest patents and then sue companies in Texas (they already attack in China too). After Microsoft destroyed Yahoo guess where the patents are going. As IAM explained yesterday:
Altaba, the company formed following the sale of Yahoo!’s core business, has transferred a small patent portfolio to an affiliate of IPNav offshoot Dominion Harbor.
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The deal is further evidence that we’re seeing the next iteration of the NPE market with large portfolios of assets being broken up as they’re sold. Intellectual Ventures, which has one of the largest portfolios in the US, has ramped up its patent sales in the last year selling assets to the likes of Dominion Harbor and Equitable IP. As this blog has reported, many of those assets have quickly ended up being asserted in court against alleged infringers, suggesting that they become potentially far more threatening to possible licensees once they have been transferred. In line with the vast majority of patent deals in the current market, the rights concerned have typically changed hands in privateering style deals with some cash upfront and then the seller receiving a portion of any monetisation revenues.
We expect Microsoft to continue with this proliferation of software patents and patent trolls. Microsoft would boast that only its own clients can enjoy ‘protection’ (or indemnification) while at the same time threatening Android OEMs that don’t install Microsoft ‘apps’.
Microsoft is a big bully. It not only uses blackmail tactics but also bribes, as this week’s news from Munich (e.g. [1, 2]) should remind us. █
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