Bonum Certa Men Certa

Oral Arguments in the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Suggest That the TC Heartland Case Will Likely Crush the Eastern District of Texas, Presently Infested With Patent Trolls

Judge Gilstrap alone may have already caused billions of dollars in damages to legitimate (practicing) companies

Rodney Gilstrap



Summary: Courts of the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX or East Texas for short) might soon have to fold or resize, and the local economy adapt to accommodate something other than patent trolls and aggressors, based on words (questions) heard at the highest courtroom in the United States

MANY eyes are on SCOTUS this week, for it can seriously influence the USPTO as much as it influences the courts. Are patent trolls going to receive one final death blow (not entirely mortal, but enough to weed out most of them)? Two cases currently deal with it, one covered in IAM (with the expected bias, being IAM) and another by MIP yesterday. Behind a paywall, as usual, clues are given that the future of patent trolls in the US seems anything but promising. They might soon be more or less defanged, as their historical preference for East Texas can belatedly come to an end. Natalie Rahhal wrote about "[q]uestions from some Supreme Court justices in oral arguments in TC Heartland v Kraft," saying that these "suggested a desire to overturn the Federal Circuit on patent venue."



As a crucial reminder, the Federal Circuit ruled in TC Heartland that it's fine for trolls to carry on and last month Professor Dennis Crouch said that "TC Heartland doesn’t seem like a case the Supreme Court would hear simply to affirm" but rather to overturn. There is no level higher than SCOTUS, so if SCOTUS says no to East Texas, then it's a big no. The corporate media obsesses over the effect on local businesses, rather than the effect on victimised companies which get dragged into Texan courts that are a sham. Employees lose their jobs over such lawsuits. Entire companies can collapse. The other day we shared the following video:



"Are patent trolls going to receive one final death blow (not entirely mortal, but enough to weed out most of them)?"Yesterday we wrote about LG resorting to the use of patent trolls for legal leverage -- a truly despicable tactic conveniently overlooked by the English-speaking Korean media.

Elsevier, in the mean time, has published this new article titled "Standing Up to the Patent Troll, the Big Bad Wolf of the Patent World" and it's not too flattering to trolls. To quote a part which advocates the America Invents Act:

Regardless of how you define the term “patent troll,” most people agree that such entities are bad news for our economy because they cost consumers and retailers billions of dollars each year. The patent troll is, for lack of a better analogy, the big bad wolf of the patent world, huffing and puffing by suing legitimate businesses for patent infringement. The question that remains is what can be done about them? More specifically, must one succumb to litigating a patent infringement lawsuit in federal court in order to defeat a patent troll? The short answer is, not always. Recently Congress, through its passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (“AIA”), provided alleged patent infringers with several tools to invalidate patents outside of U.S. district court litigation. Indeed, in many instances alleged patent infringers can challenge patents in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“U.S. PTO”) using proceedings known as “post-grant proceedings.” Among other advantages, post-grant proceedings are typically less expensive and faster than district court litigation. And if the U.S. PTO invalidates one or more claims of a patent before a district court reaches its decision in a patent troll’s infringement litigation, the patent troll’s district court litigation is likely to end. While there is still much work to be done to solve the problem of patent trolls, Congress’ implementation of post-grant proceedings has restored some of the balance of power between patent trolls and those they allege infringe their patents.


The America Invents Act (AIA) has done so much to improve the US patent system and even invalidate a lot of software patents, thanks in part to Alice (SCOTUS). Patent maximalists are still licking their wounds over it and one of them asks questions like, "How Technical Must an Improvement be to Survive 101?" (via this proponent of software patents)

"Now we just need to stride forward or strive for the end of East Texas as the hotbed of patent trolls and then put an end to trolls once and for all."That's the wrong question to ask. 101 is about "abstract" or not, not "technical" (whatever that means) or not; perhaps the writer conflates that with something of the EPO. Either way, the writer says "[t]he technical nature of a claimed improvement is central to the evaluation of claims under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. Two recent district court opinions illustrate that whether or not the claims describe an improvement in the functioning of a computer itself can be determinative."

Well, district court opinions barely bear any weight compared to anything from CAFC and SCOTUS, which are both hostile towards software patents in general. Now we just need to stride forward or strive for the end of East Texas as the hotbed of patent trolls and then put an end to trolls once and for all. They are in no way promoting innovation; they suppress innovation. Many of them are being used as proxies of large corporations such as Microsoft in order to taunt and cause damage to their rivals. LG is just one example that we named earlier this week.

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
 
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
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
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
Slopwatch: Plagiarism, Fake Articles, and FUD About Linux
not a day goes by without Google News feeding FUD from slopfarms
Gemini Links 01/10/2025: Chat Control and End of Life
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: Long Covid Risk Reiterated, "Bitcoin Queen" Caught
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: EA $55 Billion Deal is Debt and Slop "Raises Vishing Risks"
Links for the day
Bluewashing at Red Hat Means Redundancies
The man who sold Red Hat to IBM meanwhile became a Microsoft Mono booster
After Killing OpenSource.com, IBM ('Red Hat') and OSI Told Us OpenSource.net Would Replace It (But That Didn't Happen)
Now it's time to move on, perhaps tarnishing the "Open Source" label some more (for whatever sponsor wants this)
Linux is Not a Community Project, It's a Wall Street Product
The core goal should be freedom
Bad Actors Abusing the Free Software Community, Vandalising It Using Rogue Politics and Old Tactics
Oil giants have long attempted to do this; now, the digital equivalent of Big Oil does this in technology
Social Control Media Isn't the Future, The Federation or Fediverse Isn't Growing, People's Accounts Vanish for Good
users' accounts will get deleted, not just become inactive
IBM is Failing, This Helps Show Wall Street is Entirely Detached From Actual Commercial Performance
IBM is unable to grow, it's just constantly shrinking
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Clerical Aspects of Publishing and Development
In Free software, the management aspects are considerably reduced
Slopwatch: Fake Articles and Google News Promoting "Linux" Spam or Bot-Generated Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
These slopfarms help misplace blame
Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in September, This Time Many in Liverpool Affected
Be ready for more waves of layoffs ahead of the so-called "results" in late October