Silicon Valley Patent Attorneys Register Their Own Patents; Sue Google, Microsoft, Yahoo And Others
from the more-lucrative dept
A few months ago, we pointed to Joe Mullin's excellent article detailing how various patent attorneys were finding a lucrative side business in registering or buying their own patents and suing companies themselves. It's just that much more lucrative. Mullin is back, describing two Silicon Valley patent attorneys, Dominic Kotab and Kevin Zilka, who have been registering or buying a bunch of patents, and have been quite active in both setting up multiple shell companies, and suing many different defendants. And, despite the fact that they're both based in San Jose, right down the street from many of the firms they've sued, all of the lawsuits are being filed in Texas, of course. This includes a lawsuit against Adobe, whose headquarters are a mere four blocks from the offices of Kotab and Zilka. Adobe asked for the case to be transferred to California... and the request was rejected.They've sued pretty much all of the big name tech companies, including Microsoft (five different times, on five different patents), Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, AT&T, AOL and many, many others. The most recent is a lawsuit against Google for apparently violating this patent, which the lawyers claim Google is violating with its new Chrome browser.
Filed Under: dominic kotab, kevin zilka, patent attorneys, patents
Companies: google, microsoft, yahoo
