Still Trying To Track Down Who Controls Patent Used Against Reddit, Digg, Fark, Slashdot & TechCrunch

from the making-progress dept

We recently wrote about a patent (6,370,535) around a system for generating a news or press release online, which is being used by a shell company called Gooseberry Natural Resources to sue a ton of companies, including aggregators like Reddit, Fark, Digg & Delicious, as well as blogs like Slashdot and TechCrunch. One of the issues around the patent is that it's currently held by a shell company, owned by another shell company, and all anyone knows is who the lawyers are, rather than who actually controls the patent. This is all too common in cases of patent trolling, where a series of shell companies are set up to obfuscate who really holds the patent.

We wondered if the enterprising folks at Reddit might be able to dig out some more info, and they took up the challenge. Unfortunately, so far, all they've been able to do is suss out a few more shell companies -- and lawyers representing them -- but no clear info about who's really pulling the strings here. You can read through that long comment thread, but for a quick summary, the original inventors of the patent, Eileen C. Shapiro and Steven J. Mintz, may or may not still have some association with it. Eileen refuses to comment, saying she was "under NDA" on the matter.

However, others did note that among the pair's other patents are two (7,725,347 and 7,184,968) that are both being used in another lawsuit, this one filed by "Blackstone River LLC" against eHarmony, Match.com, Plentyoffish and a few other online dating sites.

Meanwhile, the original assignee for the patent, NewsGems LLC (which was apparently owned by Mintz), later assigned the patent to another operation, Kolomoki Mounds LLC. Separately, filed with this lawsuit is the statement of interested parties, which lists Kolomoki Mounds LLC, Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC and a third company Transmogrification Security AG LLC.

Separately, as we had already known originally, the parent company of Gooseberry is Vertigo Holdings LLC. It turns out that Vertigo Holdings also is the parent company of Blackstone River LLC -- the same company we mentioned above using two other patents by the same inventors to sue a bunch of dating sites. Hmm.

One of the Reddit comments also lists two other "sibling" companies allegedly owned by Vertigo: Fowler Woods LLC and Wolf Run Hollow LLC. Fowler Woods made some news last year for suing a ton of online radio offerings for patent infringement, including Pandora and Slacker, as well as a bunch of media sites, including the Huffington Post, Glam Media and AH Belo -- who is also one of the companies sued in this case that we've been discussing. The patent in question (6,351,736) in that lawsuit was not a Shapiro/Mintz invention, but by some others. Meanwhile, Wolf Run Hollow has been suing a ton of banks and credit unions over a different patent (6,115,817), which claims to broadly cover sending secure messages over an insecure network (no, seriously). Wolf Run Hollow appears to have been created by Vertigo.

Unfortunately, that's about where the sleuthing runs out... and it really doesn't tell us that much. We already knew that Vertigo was the parent company, and who owns/runs Vertigo is secret. We did learn that another company owned by Vertigo is using more patents from the same inventors to sue more companies, but that's about it. Either way, as a basic exercise, it certainly teaches you a fair amount about the sneaky and hidden nature of how patent trolls operate, with layer upon layer of shell companies, changing patent assignments and licenses, all of which hide whoever is actually pulling the strings. It really does make you wonder how this kind of thing does anything whatsoever to improve innovation.

Filed Under: patents, reddit, shell companies

Reddit's Altruism Compared To 4chan's Trollism

from the but-are-they-the-same-people? dept

There's a wonderful saying that I keep seeing get passed around lately, that:

Reddit makes me like people I've never met, while Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.

While I believe the quote actually started with Twitter in place of Reddit, there's certainly an element of truth there (no matter which service you're talking about). Mathew Ingram points us to an excellent listing of some amazing stories of altruism performed by the Reddit community. The post lists out 25 separate -- and often quite amazing -- stories of true altruism from the Reddit community. It's really quite an uplifting piece, and if you've spent time in the Reddit community, you're sure to recognize many of these stories.

It's also a nice antidote to all the claims we hear from people who think that the "online mobs" out there only perform acts of malice and attacks. Of course, stories of such things are often dominated by stories of sites like 4chan. But what really strikes me about all of this is that in my experience, it often feels like there are many of the same people who hang out on both sites. While I'm sure there are many who spend time on one or the other, in the Venn Diagram of both communities, I would imagine there's a fair bit of overlap. And yet, people always talk about how the 4chan (mainly /b/) community is the worst of the worst when it comes to doing despicable things, and here's a situation in which perhaps the very same people are seen doing amazing things. There's even one "crossover" story, involving a situation that originated on 4chan, where someone had posted an image of an upcoming 90th birthday party of a guy who... looked a bit lonely in the picture (his family later denied this...). However, both the 4chan and the Reddit communities jumped onto this and decided to "cheer the guy up," sending him tons of presents, and even having a bunch of folks (from both communities) show up at his party.

I'm not sure exactly what this all means, but it does seem like the rather simplistic story you often hear in the media about the "hurtful" nature of online communities is often ignoring that the very same people can be amazingly helpful at times as well.

Filed Under: 4chan, altruism, communities, reddit, trolling
Companies: 4chan, reddit

How Is It That A Random Comment On Reddit Leads To Your Friend Getting Tracked By The FBI?

from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept

Last week, we wrote about the guy who found an FBI tracking device on his car. His friend then posted the pics to Reddit, leading the FBI to show up at the original guy's house, demanding the tracking device back. One odd part of the story is that in the discussion that ensued, the law enforcement agents showed the guy a post his friend (the one on Reddit) had made. This is how Wired described that part of the story:

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions -- did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi's friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had "something to do with a mall or a bomb," Afifi said. He hadn't seen it before and doesn't know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post.

"He's a smart kid and is not affiliated with anything extreme and never says anything stupid like that," Afifi said. "I've known that guy my whole life."

Someone in our comments quickly pointed out that the "blog post" in question was actually a comment on Reddit that was in response to a discussion about silly security procedures, and the entire comment reads:

bombing a mall seems so easy to do. i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.. you can put a bag in a million different places, there would be no way to foresee the next target, and really no way to prevent it unless CTU gets some intel at the last minute in which case every city but LA is fucked...so...yea...now i'm surely bugged : /

I'm having trouble seeing how anyone could read that and think there's anything suspicious at all about it. But, as Bruce Schneier notes, what's really bizarre is how that comment doesn't just lead to the guy being tracked, but his friend having his movements tracked.

If they're doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now -- perhaps because of this blog?

Schneier also wonders how many people are combing through the depths of sites like Reddit to totally misread comments out of context, and then using them to start surveilling someone's whereabouts.

Filed Under: comments, fbi, reddit, tracking

Reddit, Sears, Grills That Cook Babies... And The Streisand Effect

from the have-at-it dept

Adam sends in a link to a Reddit story where it comes out that someone (not entirely sure who) decided to push Reddit to take down an earlier story. Apparently Sears.com had some oddity in how content on its e-commerce site was displayed, and with a little URL-hacking some folks were able to create a Sears.com e-commerce page for a barbecue grill designed to cook babies: Pretty amusing, and obviously something that Sears wasn't all that happy about. Sears's explanation for what happened doesn't quite make much sense, but what would you expect?

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages

It wasn't so much "defacing" from the sound of it, as it was a bug in the way the site was set up, but, what doesn't make much sense is that someone then forced Reddit to remove its original thread discussing Sears' URL hackability. It's not at all clear who specifically got Reddit to take down the thread, though an admin admits that he was told to take it down. The obvious list of culprits, of course, would be Sears and Conde Nast (owners of Reddit).

Still, it should come as no surprise that the Reddit community doesn't take kindly to the idea that someone (whoever it might be) can dictate that a Reddit thread get deleted when it's not spam. So, now they've been pumping up this particular story about Reddit pulling down the thread, giving the whole story much more attention. Wouldn't it just have been better to fix the URL-hackability and let things be?

Filed Under: reddit, streisand effect, url hacking
Companies: conde nast, sears