Neither public shaming nor calls for reform from the highest level of government has dissuaded Intellectual Ventures from its massive patent lawsuit campaign against businesses large and small. Read more »
Patent trolls have been bleeding legitimate businesses for years — now a state government has turned the tables and asked a troll to pay $10,000 for each of the hundreds of threatening letters it has mailed out. Read more »
Rackspace is taking one for the team by trying to invalidate a patent that an alleged patent troll claims covers the ability for mobile displays to rotate as the device turns. Read more »
President Obama offered some tough talk on patent trolls, the parasite shell companies that are taxing the start-up sector. He has the power to fix the problem — it’s time for him to use it. Read more »
IBM proudly retained its usual top slot in the annual patent count. Other winners included rivals Google and Apple, which both saw big growth in the number of patents issued but did not crack the top ten. Read more »
A mysterious shell company is suing the New York Times and other major media outlets for patent infringement because they offer mobile apps and a website. The companies now face the unpleasant choice between paying the firm to go away or saddling up for a multi-million dollar legal fight. Read more at paidContent »
An advocacy group for tech companies has launched a new website, Patent Progress, that provides policy makes and the public with ideas about how to fix the country’s broken patent system. Read more »
Intellectual Ventures has been invisibly bleeding billions from creative companies — but its activities don’t often come to light thanks to a clever use of shell companies. This could change. Read more »
A study of 500 patent lawsuits found that those brought by patent trolls, which the study’s authors call “monetizers,” account for nearly 40 percent of the cases brought in 2011. Of course, their study doesn’t account for the untold thousands that never make it to court. Read more »
Win or lose, it usually doesn’t cost a lot for patent trolls to bring spurious lawsuits against companies and technologists. In this guest post, Ben Lee of Twitter argues that it’s time for trolls to bear more of the costs they create with baseless lawsuits. Read more »
Patent troll suits — in which shell companies that don’t make anything sue those that do — are proliferating. The latest example may include a shell firm suing Facebook and others for using banner ads. Read more »
The patent troll problem is spreading from the tech sector to media companies. Rather than paying off the trolls, the New York Times is holding its ground in two major patent cases. Read more at paidContent »
The company that has done incalculable harm to America’s technology sector with a ruinous patent litigation campaign is now hoping to hire a global do-gooder. Candidates should think twice about taking the job. Read more »
Big data has become the latest front for the patent troll epidemic as a shell company is suing firms for using a common software framework known as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Read more »
The US Patent Office announced it’s moving operations closer to America’s innovation centers by opening new satellite offices in Dallas, Denver and San Jose. Here’s a Q&A of what this means and why the new offices may face a staffing shortage. Read more »
Oracle, it seems, is not one for irony. Right after an epic court fight with Google in which it was accused of abusing intellectual property, the software maker is now trying to dissolve another company’s patents Read more »
Research In Motion’s beleaguered BlackBerrys are known as many things but are generally not thought of as entertainment devices. That hasn’t stopped a shell company from suing RIM for infringing a patent for a music playlist. Read more »
Inventors, lawyers and scholars are meeting in Silicon Valley at Defense 2.0: New Strategies for Reducing Patent Risk to discuss the wave of… Read more at paidContent »
