Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patent Trolls Roundup: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), Microsoft Trolls, and the Eastern District of Texas

Hublink, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary
Hublink, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary, is also based in Texas (Dominion Harbor receives its patents from Microsoft's patent troll, Intellectual Ventures)



Summary: A look at challenged patents and patent lawsuits that are associated with patent trolls or Microsoft's distant proxies that are based in Texas

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT in Canada is coming to grips with the need to tackle patent trolls, whereas the EPO does anything it can to attract them (e.g. low-quality patents, UPC and expensive appeals). As for the USPTO, things are improving a bit over time. We're optimistic.



"The general pattern is, PTAB tackles a lot of software patents, which are the trolls’ favourite weapon (for reasons we explained before)."Earlier this week, according to RPX, patent trolls still accounted for too many lawsuits in the US. RPX will probably go out of business some time very soon (good riddance), but these statistics are valuable. "According to RPX Corp.," United for Patent Reform wrote, "of the 32 patent suits filed yesterday, 27 were filed by patent trolls. That's 84%."

A few days later it wrote:

According to RPX Corp., 15 of the 22 patent suits filed yesterday were filed by #patenttrolls. That's 68%.


That's relatively low (compared to most dates). Sometimes it's well over 90%.

Mr. Gross, who writes for patent trolls (including Dominion Harbor), continues to moan about the status quo not because there are too many trolls but not enough of them (according to him). We're generally rather cynical about his tweets; among the latest, about IBM and PTAB:

IBM invention on customizing messages fails as "abstract idea" bc it does not "improve any technology"? https://e-foia.uspto.gov/Foia/RetrievePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd2017002782-04-23-2018-1 … PTAB also confuses role of claims and spec: "Although it may be a feat...emulating human intelligence, the claimed invention provides no particularity"


Another rant about abstract ideas:

PTAB perverts ALICE 101 test: "The issues of eligible subject matter tum primarily on whether the claims recite more than abstract conceptual advice of what a computer is to provide without implementation details." https://e-foia.uspto.gov/Foia/RetrievePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd2016005837-04-20-2018-1 … ALICE silent re: "implementation details"


Then there's one about Microsoft:

Your dose of daily PTAB insanity: MSFT discovers that "creating an insulator in a host webpage in a browser" is just an "abstract idea" https://e-foia.uspto.gov/Foia/RetrievePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd2016008168-04-24-2018-1 … HOW DOES THIS NOT MEET THE DDR TEST???


The general pattern is, PTAB tackles a lot of software patents, which are the trolls' favourite weapon (for reasons we explained before).

Take for example Uniloc, which Microsoft paid a lot of money about a decade ago. Robert Jain from Unified Patents (an RPX competitor) is causing this patent troll to run away, having petitioned PTAB. In his own words:

On April 25, 2018, the Board granted Uniloc’s request for adverse judgment and cancellation of all challenged claims in IPR2017-01850 filed by Unified Patents. This request comes shortly after the PTAB's decision to institute trial on US 8,838,976 directed to an online service user authentication system.


Good riddance. "Uniloc abandons patent after Unified [Patents] files IPR," Jain wrote. Jain also wrote about the large patent troll Dominion Harbor (connected to Microsoft through Intellectual Ventures) and one of its proxies called Hublink, sporting its likely bogus patent.

In his words:

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Raman Deep Singh, who received a cash prize of $2000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 7,239,338, owned by Hublink, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary and well-known NPE. The '338 patent, directed towards a video conferencing system, has been asserted against numerous companies in district court litigation. To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests.


It's worth remembering that we deal here with several levels of 'proxies'. Hublink is controlled by Dominion Harbor, which is being armed by Intellectual Ventures, which is being sponsored by Microsoft. All these indirections don't quite fool us as we've been tracking and writing about these trolls for almost 12 years. According to this, "Hublink, LLC filed as a Domestic Limited Liability Company (LLC) in the State of Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 and is approximately one year old, according to public records filed with Texas Secretary of State."

Texas again, just like its creator, Dominion Harbor.

Marshall Phelps, the man who turned IBM and Microsoft into de facto patent trolls, is still up to no good, urging for aggression again, this time in the context of Uber. Days ago he wrote this:

Everybody knows that strong patents help decide the winners and losers of business competition — which is why companies applied for roughly 600,000 of them in the U.S. last year (though only half that number were granted). But there’s another, little-known way for companies to acquire the patents they need: they can simply buy them.

Patent sales usually involve a smaller company buying patents from a larger one, with the transfers benefiting both buyer and seller alike. This is especially true for startups, which can use patent purchases to leverage the vast R&D resources of major technology firms.

Take Uber. As is often the case with startup companies, it would have taken Uber many years to internally develop a patent portfolio capable of protecting its innovations and ensuring freedom of action in the marketplace. This is a perennial problem faced by startups historically, from Google to Facebook more recently, especially as they prepare to go public, which along with generating cash also paints a giant patent bullseye on the newly-public company’s back.


Well, Mr. Phelps has not changed. Everything he touches turns into a patent bully/aggressor/troll. That's just his career's legacy in a nutshell.

Staying on the subject of Microsoft, which is not only a patent extortionist but also patent trolls feeder, Microsoft gets sued in the Eastern District of Texas. As reported several days ago by WIPR:

Microsoft is facing a legal battle over the alleged infringement of patents relating to video game lighting technology.

In a complaint, filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, video game developers Infernal Technologies and Terminal Reality accused Microsoft of infringing its patents for in-game lighting and shadows with various game engines.

A game engine is a software development environment that allows developers to create video games. Game engines have a variety of functions, including a rendering engine, which allows developers to perform deferred rendering, deferred shading and deferred lighting, all of which affect the visual aspect of a scene in a video game.


A Microsoft advocacy site called it a "patent troll" and named the patent, which is a software patent:

Patent trolls are common in the technology industry and it seems like "Terminal Reality and Infernal Technologies" is targeting Microsoft this time. You might remember the name from a complaint involving EA from 2015. While that case was settled around October 2017, it seems like the company has a new target. Developer Terminal Reality closed in 2013, and since then it seems like its affiliate Infernal Technologies has been suing game developers.

According to post by IGN, Terminal Reality and Infernal Technologies has accused Microsoft of "egregious and wilful" patent infringement of Patent 6,362,822 and Patent 7,061,488 relating to game lighting and shadows. The plaintiff claims that it developed the "Infernal Engine" which it then licensed to other studios. The company also says that games like Halo 5: Guardians, numerous Forza titles, Sea of Thieves, and even PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds infringe upon its patents.


In the Eastern District of Texas they might actually tolerate such abstract patents, but can CAFC or PTAB get involved? 4 days ago the Docket Navigator wrote about Sandoz, Inc. et al v Duke University et al, which is another case in the Eastern District of Texas. It is the patent trolls' favourite venue, but possibly an "improper venue" (after TC Heartland many of these things changed):

The court granted defendants' motion to dismiss plaintiffs' second-filed declaratory relief action under the first-to-file rule even though the defendants' first-filed action was filed in an improper venue.


Docket Navigator also wrote about Elbit Systems Land and C4I Ltd. et al v Hughes Network Systems LLC et al. In the Eastern District of Texas, the patent trolls' breeding ground, the "defendant's litigation conduct was [deemed] exceptional" after Elbit (from Israel) had acted like a troll. Being Texas, one can expect a plaintiff-friendly ruling:

Following a jury verdict of $21 million, the court granted plaintiffs' motion for attorney fees under 35 U.S.C. €§ 285 because defendant's litigation conduct was exceptional.


Why have they put a jury in charge of a verdict on technical matters?! Appeal to CAFC perhaps?

Speaking of misconduct, watch the latest on this Gilead case, in which the "patents are unenforceable due to Merck’s “unclean hands” involving both business and litigation misconduct."

To quote Patently-O:

The district court rejected a $200 million jury verdict against Gilead’s infringing Hep-C sofosbufir drugs. Rather than enforcing the jury verdict, the district court held instead that the patents are unenforceable due to Merck’s “unclean hands” involving both business and litigation misconduct.


There's another case involving Gilead (Teva v Gilead) and it involves SPCs. As one site framed it the other day:

Advocate General Wathelet has rejected the UK court’s suggestion that “core inventive advance” is a relevant consideration in determining whether a basic patent protects an active ingredient within the meaning of Article 3(a)

Advocate General Wathelet has provided an opinion in the Teva v Gilead case in which a UK court referred a question regarding supplementary certificates (SPCs) to the CJEU.


Notice the role of the CJEU (European) in SPCs in the UK -- something that Team UPC lobbies very hard for. They hope to make life a lot easier for trolls and massive pharmaceutical companies looking to shut down rivals (like generics), even by raids and embargoes. They are trying to turn Europe into another Eastern District of Texas.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Red Hat QA Team "Had Shrunk by Half Over the Past Year." (After IBM Divestment)
If Red Hat's workforce is being moved to the East, then RHEL can become a national security problem
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 04, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, September 04, 2025
Microsoft Started With Code Literally From The Trash, Nothing Has Improved Since
The reality is, there are systems and code that are reliable. But they're not Microsoft's.
BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs
Hypothesis That New McKinsey/Microsoft Executive Inside Red Hat Will Outsource Research and Development Operations to India (Like They Do in IBM)
IBM is floundering
Slopwatch: Scams, Fake Articles About "Linux", Plagiarism, and Worse
Perhaps some time soon the LLMs or the "Big LLMs" will run out of money (to borrow) and go offline, leaving those slopfarms in a tough place
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Means of Production and Rusting Out
Links for the day
Links 04/09/2025: Science, Hardware, and Eyes on China
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Digital Minimalism and Social Control Media
Links for the day
IBM's GNU/Linux Divestment, Based on Hard But Anecdotal Evidence (IBM Fails to Recognise How Much Money It Made and Can Still Make From "Linux")
Love us or hate us, a lot of what we've been saying about Red Hat under IBM turns out to be rather accurate
Links 04/09/2025: Massive Microsoft Staff Cuts (Barely Reported), "Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI"
Links for the day
Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap, not free hosting
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Katrina Remembered, Distracted Driving, and Virtual Economics
Links for the day
At This Point It's No Longer Matthew Garrett But People Who Fund Matthew Garrett (or Companies That Fund His SLAPPs Against My Wife and I)
The only thing worse than misogynists are misogynists who fail to respect other people's right to go on holiday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 03, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 03, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
The term "Serious Harm" is legally meaningful here
GNOME Unfit for Diversity and Inclusion
GNOME's leadership is using "bad words"
Brodie Robertson Addressing the Recently-Discovered Comments
Most people probably knew nothing about this until he wrote a response
Slopwatch: "Open Source" and "Linux" News Faked, Made by Bots and Entered Into Google News
Spam combined with slop about "Linux" has entered Google News
Links 03/09/2025: Microsoft Causes Mass Layoffs Outside Microsoft Also, "Google Can Keep Paying for Firefox Search Deal"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/09/2025: calendar.txt, Alhena 5.3.1, and ROOPHLOCH
Links for the day
The Theory That the Man From McKinsey, Whom Red Hat Took From Microsoft a Month Ago as Executive, Wants 'Efficiency' (Lower Salaries)
So far... no "official" word
When Your Site's Articles Are Being 'Cheapened' by Slop as Feature Images
Dr. Farnell should become an advisor to The Register MS
Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt Drops to Only Half a Dozen Capsules and 0.2% of the Whole in Geminispace, Self-Signed is the Way to Go
It used to have hundreds, according to Lupa
Doing to Red Hat What They Already Did (and Still Do) to IBM
there seems to be a drive to hire cheaper staff, and it may be led by somebody Red Hat hired from Microsoft
Links 03/09/2025: Salesforce's Latest Mass Layoffs, 93% in Large Poll at The Register MS Say UK Government Should Dump Microsoft
Links for the day
Preparations for Our 19th Anniversary Have Already Begun
When we get back we'll probably sort out some balloons and venue for the next party
Pleased After 2 Years With team.blue
Moving from a Content Management System (CMS, dynamic) to a Static Site Generator (SSG) was a wise decision that made life so much easier
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is Being Attacked by Organisations Jealous of Its Principled Stance and Longevity
Nobody is perfect, but imperfection does not instantaneously imply sinister intent
If You Reject the Google Verdict in the US, Then You Should Also Reject the "Modern" Web (Do Something About It)
Gemini Protocol is still open; it cannot be hijacked or subverted because it's frozen by design and by intention
Open Source Initiative IRS Filing: Almost All the Money is Corporate, Stefano Maffuli (Executive Director) Takes About a Quarter of That Money for Openwashing of "AI" Ponzi Scheme
OSI is currently little but a PR/marketing agency of Microsoft
Many People Are "Leaving" Red Hat, Even High-Level Managers
Something is definitely going on at Red Hat
Techrights Has Been Subjected to Calls of Violence (and Death Threats), It Never Condoned Violence
I have no sympathy for people who call violence "free speech" and then get in trouble
Condoning Violent Behaviour and "Free Speech"
perhaps Microsoft Lunduke lost touch with what constitutes violence
Takeaway From the Google Verdict: GAFAM Has Too Much Control (Even Over the US Government and Courts With Government Appointees)
Many people feel disappointed but hardly surprised by the verdict
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 in One Month
As noted a few days ago, several times in fact, many people now recognise the importance of the FSF's mission, even if most people don't know what the FSF is
Many Microsoft "Assets" Are Fabricated Baloney (to Game the Numbers)
At times it seems like what we deal with are many weak patents (on algorithms), valuations or speculations based on hype ("hey hi"), and stocks held by Microsoft and its own staff
"Voluntary" Layoffs at Microsoft (to Game the Numbers, Sugar-Coating a Crisis)
"Employees interested have until the end of October to volunteer."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 02, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 02, 2025