If At First You Don't Succeed As A Patent Troll, Just Sue Again
from the why-not dept
The excellent new Patent Examiner blog has a post up about a company called SmartMetric, which claims to be in the business of making biometric technologies, but admits it hasn't actually made any money doing that. Instead, it seems to be in the business of being a patent troll. Despite the fact that banks and others have been testing variations on "smart card" technology for many decades, SmartMetric ended up with patent 6,792,464, which it claims covers all kinds of smartcards. Last year, it sued Visa, MasterCard and American Express. And lost.But why worry about that when it can just sue again?
Yes, even as it's appealing the initial loss, the company has sued the same companies a second time using a nearly identical filing. You can see both filings embedded below. Feel free to do a diff on the two, but Patent Examiner summarizes the two cases this way:
This new lawsuit against MasterCard and Visa concerns both “contact” and “contactless” smart cards (the former are inserted into a card reader, the latter only need to be placed in proximity to a reader), while SmartMetric’s first lawsuit against the credit companies only referred to contactless card systems.So, basically, after losing, they're just trying to expand what they claim the patent covers. It's hard to see this as anything more than a standard patent troll shakedown of a company that doesn't do anything demanding cash from the companies who do things... even when those things are obvious next steps that were discussed decades before the troll came on the scene.
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Filed Under: patent troll, patents
Companies: american express, mastercard, smartmetric, visa
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Newbs
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Re: Newbs
That sounds like a nice non-obvious idea though - I'd better go patent it!
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http://opensource.com/law/11/9/ginormous-losses-npe-software-patent-lawsuits
http://openso urce.com/business/11/9/open-business-reputation-economy-open-source-do-you-take-egg-roll
On an unrelated note, finally I can see mythical ad here LoL
http://cdn.techdirt.com/images/ads/SVCF_logo_RGB.png
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Unrelated
Don't you read your own posts?
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Re: Unrelated
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Re: Unrelated
http://www.ghostery.com/download
"Ghostery sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity. "
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Re: Unrelated
http://www.ghostery.com/download
"Ghostery sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity. "
Using that you get the name of the webbugs and know what to block using other tools.
Like the Wybiya toolbar annoying thing that some people have complained about some time ago.
http://www.ghostery.com/apps/wibiya_toolbar
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Re: Unrelated
Now really unrelated, anybody knows of a Linux malzilla(javascript malware buster) type of thing?
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Re: Unrelated
Don't you read your own posts?
Er... we're not? Can you provide any more info on this? We're certainly not doing that ourselves.
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Re: Unrelated
However, we have received a few messages in the past 12 hours about the issue. We're looking into it, but it appears to be related to a Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere. For some reason, that extension and the Like button appear to not be playing well together. We don't have any more details than that, yet. But we'll let you know when we do.
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Re: Re: Unrelated
Thank god!
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Re: Re: Unrelated
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First, a lawsuit troll generally benefits by filing the same or a similar suit against multiple companies. The troll gets some economies of scale because they can reuse a lot of their legal research. On the other hand, each defendant is likely to have to either do all of the research from scratch or hire an expensive specialty law firm to handle the case. Refiling an almost identical suit against the same defendant means that they also get to reuse their legal research.
Second, most trolls are hoping for a settlement. Suing a firm that is willing and able to defend itself in court pretty much rules out the route to a quick ROI.
Perhaps in this case SmartMetric thinks they have a chance of winning. But if that is the case, they probably need to get some new legal council. SmartMetric has already lost the case once and judges are notoriously cranky when it comes to refiling a lawsuit that has already been decided, especially if it is done in the same jurisdiction.
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Let me fix the headline for you
If At First You Don't Succeed As A Patent Troll, Just Sue Again
Should be:
If At First You Don't Succeed, Sue Sue Again
(If at first you don't succeed, use a shorter bungee.)
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another biased article
https://www.insightcommunity.com/cases.php?n=10&pg=1
They sell 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 and his monkeys are not reporters. They are patent system saboteurs receiving funding from huge corporate infringers. They cannot be trusted and have no credibility. All they know about patents is they don’t have any.
Call it what you will...patent hoarder, patent troll, non-practicing entity, etc. It all means one thing: “we’re using your invention and we’re not going to pay”. This is just dissembling by large infringers to kill any inventor support system. It is purely about legalizing theft.
Prior to eBay v Mercexchange, small entities had a viable chance at commercializing their inventions. If the defendant was found guilty, an injunction was most always issued. Then the inventor small entity could enjoy the exclusive use of his invention in commercializing it. Unfortunately, injunctions are often no longer available to small entity inventors because of the Supreme Court decision so we have no fair chance to compete with much larger entities who are now free to use our inventions. Essentially, large infringers now have your gun and all the bullets. Worse yet, inability to commercialize means those same small entities will not be hiring new employees to roll out their products and services. And now some of those same parties who killed injunctions for small entities and thus blocked their chance at commercializing now complain that small entity inventors are not commercializing. They created the problem and now they want to blame small entities for it. What dissembling! If you don’t like this state of affairs (your unemployment is running out), tell your Congress member. Then maybe we can get some sense back in the patent system with injunctions fully enforceable on all infringers by all inventors, large and small.
For the truth about trolls, please see http://truereform.piausa.org/default.html#pt.
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