Day Before Patent Reform Was Signed, Mad Dash By Trolls To Sue: 51 Cases Against 680 Defendants
from the in-under-the-wire dept
While we still think that the new patent law that was signed by the President last week won't do much to make a difference, it does appear that a bunch of trolls who were at least a little concerned about the "joinder reform" part decide to sneak in as many cases against as many defendants as possible before the law went into effect. As you may recall, one of the few useful parts of the law was that it made it harder for patent holders to lump together totally unrelated companies into a single lawsuit. Doing so was popular for a variety of reasons: it's cheaper, obviously, but also because it made it easier to justify an East Texas (or other preferred) jurisdiction.Groklaw noted a bunch of last minute patent troll lawsuits being filed right before the bill was signed into law, naming three such trolls that brought 12 cases against 222 companies, but also noting that this didn't represent all such cases. In fact, the folks at RPX contacted us with more data on this, noting that 85 cases against over 800 defendants were filed in the two week period before the bill was signed into law... and that includes 51 cases against 680 defendants the day before the bill was signed into law. This is in comparison to an average of about 160 companies sued in a "normal" week for infringement.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: lawsuits, patent reform, patent trolls, patents
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
The problem, was the joinder reform was the only useful thing in the bill. The patent trolls will still be able to abuse patent law, they'll just have to pay a bit more because they can't lump all of the defendants into one lawsuit.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
After the law passed, you should* see no more cases filed against 100s of defendants together in a single case. What you'll see instead is 100s of different cases.
This has potential to be both good and bad for defendants. We shall see. The reasons for this are too numerous and complex to explain in a comment, though.
* I'll note that there have been several cases naming multiple seemingly unrelated defendants filed after the law passed.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
sorely needed
[ link to this | view in thread ]
another biased article
https://www.insightcommunity.com/cases.php?n=10&pg=1
He sells blog filler and "insights" to major corporations including MS, HP, IBM etc. who just happen to be some of the world’s most frequent patent suit defendants. Obviously, he has failed to report his conflicts as any reputable reporter would. But then Masnick is not a reporter. He is a patent system saboteur receiving funding from huge corporate infringers. He cannot be trusted and has no credibility. All he knows about patents is he doesn’t have any.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]