What kind of notification will I receive when I become the target of 'Patent Troll'?



A '

patent troll ' is a person who has obtained a patent with abstract and ambiguous content and is trying to raise money by filing a lawsuit against another company saying that he 'infringes his own patent'. That is. Nathan Seidle, the founder of SparkFun , an American electronics retailer for learning, who received a notification from such a patent troll, took up the case of patent troll that he faced and explained the contents.

SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll --News --SparkFun Electronics
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/3917

◆ Patents related to having a website
The following is a document that SparkFun received from a company called Feinberg Day , and the content is to provide a license for a patent owned by a company called Sematic Search Technologies, so please contact me.



Feinberg Day is referred to are US Pat. No.

8244726 , EP 8793237 , EP 8880497 patent that the issue be of real, both are related to technology to support the keyword search of the goods on the site.

Regarding this notice, Seidle said, 'Feinberg Day's allegations are, in essence,'I noticed that you have a website. We have a patent on the website. Please call me because there is. ”This is similar to some kind of nuisance call. If you pick up the handset, you know that it is actually in use. That phone number sells well to other scammers. '

The following is a document sent by Garteiser Honea. This also means offering a license for the website in the same way as above, and the license fee is $ 49,284 (about 5.47 million yen) if the contract is concluded within 2 weeks, and $ 54,284 (about 6.03 million) if the contract is concluded within 3 weeks. It is announced that it is a yen).



Regarding this, Mr. Seidle said, 'Put a ticking clock and say,'If your reply is delayed, it will be expensive, so you should call now.' We are not lawyers, but the best response I think the solution is to ignore it, because if you're dating a patent troll, it's as endless as a bottomless swamp. '

◆ Cases in which patent infringement proceedings were actually filed
SparkFun ignored the two cases mentioned above, but also encountered a case in which a patent infringement proceeding was actually filed. That's from a company called Altair Logix. At the time of writing the article, SparkFun did not receive any notice regarding the proceedings, but an acquaintance of Mr. Seidle, who is a trademark lawyer, accidentally discovered and told me about the proceedings related to SparkFun. Seidle, who scrutinized the proceedings in the proceedings, points out several points that seem unreasonable.

First, US Patent No. 6289434 , which Altair Logix claims to hold, was filed in 1998, and the patent in the United States is valid for 20 years in principle. So the patent claimed by Altair Logix has already expired in 2018.

Also, the figure named 'Media Processing Unit' in the patent document is actually just a schematic diagram of a multi-core processor ...



Another figure is just a diagram explaining the

serial peripheral interface (SPI) widely used for data transfer devices such as SD cards. As such, U.S. Pat. No. 6289434 contained a number of patent claims that changed the name of the technology that the industry had created.



Besides, the complaint is a function of the C language to use in order to ensure the dynamic memory malloc while claiming the same thing and it is their invention, SparkFun had been sold until 2017 pcDuino the patent of them He was complaining that he was infringing.

Regarding the targeting of pcDuino, Seidle said, 'Maybe Altair Logix has won the company that made the product using the word'media'before. Fortunately, The pcDuino URL quoted in the complaint was collected by the Web Archive before the patent expired in 2018. '

Seidle then told Altair Logix, 'We sold 221 pcDuinos. We used a bogus patent and asked us for a fictitious patent fee worth $ 500. If you want to sue, please come and pick it up. '

Related Posts:

in Note, Posted by log1l_ks