Judge's Investigation into Patent Troll Results in Criminal Referrals | Hacker News Reader

Judge's Investigation into Patent Troll Results in Criminal Referrals

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83 pointsisaacfrond19 comments

>EFF and two other patent reform groups filed a brief in support of the judge’s investigation.

Nice, it's this kind of involvement in more obscure technical, but very real issues that make me an EFF member.

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It does seem very odd that "someone" can just claim ownership, file a lawsuit, and someone else has to defend themself in the face of a masked accuser whose motives, funding ... and even their own claimed ownership is so obscure that you can't effectively question it.

Good for the judge here for being curious and recognizing this conundrum.

>It does seem very odd that "someone" can just claim ownership, file a lawsuit, and someone else has to defend themself in the face of a masked accuser whose motives, funding ... and even their own claimed ownership

That fact pattern is absolutely not normal. That's why this raised so many eyebrows and actually got looked into.

Edit: Lawsuits invariably establish "who" the plaintiff is and their relationship to the defendant because this is almost always a byproduct of determining that they have and the extent to which they've been (allegedly) wronged by the defendant's actions.

I certainly did not expect the plot twist!

Id love to understand how a french government sovereign investment fund ends up involved in this.

Was the the patent troll (or really, its lawyers) vendor explicitly shopped because of a reputation for playing dirty ?

or if is a case of really, really bad incentives, where the idea was legit...but a rogue actor just took it in an unexpected direction ?

I hope the investigation can go upstream and get this information

They don't make pink slime by grinding up ribeyes.

My initial assumption is that they acquire some IP in bulk, monetized what they could in better ways and then were left with a couple D rate pieces that they happily loaned out to anyone willing to make a buck with them on the condition they get a cut. It just so happened that "anyone" was a less than upstanding party.

I imagine the explanation is a lot simpler and boring.

The french fund got some assets that they didn't know what to do with, so they just loaned it out to the highest bidder.

Just capitalism being capitalism. But that is how investment funds work - they don't usually directly manage things but give it to other people to manage.

A contemporaneous blog post about this case from 2022: https://ipde.com/blog/2022/11/04/a-wild-hearing-chief-judge-...

With a group of legal operators who are that respectable, it couldn't happen to a more deserving firm.

This calls for a round of applause :)

Hopefully they will all achieve the most widespread recognition for every bit of the work they have done over the years.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/judges-investigation-p... Original post

Courts are happy to facilitate obviously malicious parties enriching themselves pursuant to the law at the expense of parties who have done nothing wrong, they call that Tuesday, but they really, really, really don't like when parties mislead them or withhold pertinent information.

The plaintiffs here flew too close to the su. I guess they got cocky after all those years of "legit" patent trolling, lol.

Absolutely wild that it's been linked to a french government fund. I mean it's hard to believe the potential political fallout could be worth what they would get out of it, so one presumes the top doesn't know what the bottom is doing.

Most soverign wealth funds are managed very arms length from the government. Those that aren't tend to go bankrupt because the opportunity for corruption is too great.

The question I keep asking is: why? They give these patents to random people, and 5 or 10% of the proceeds if they win the suits. What do they get out of it?

If they were legit, then I don't see the need to assign the patents they own to someone else before litigating. Unless there's a gotcha, and it's a scam somehow.

Very strange, and just another reason why patents should probably be non-transferrable and "use it or lose it".

The "random people" are exposed to countersuits/liability in the event of a loss.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/judges-litigation-fundi...

> Connolly ultimately concluded that the arrangements were unfair to the LLC owners and that Pugal, Bui, and Hall should’ve had independent counsel advising them. He wrote that IP Edge structured the LLCs so that it received the lion’s share of the litigation benefits while the the on-paper owners “assume all the risk” from the lawsuits, including attorneys’ fees awards or court-imposed sanctions.

The part i don't understand - is it them personally that have the risk or the LLC? I thought the point of forming an LLC was to prevent personal luability, in which case this doesn't sound that risky from the perspective of the patent owner.

If the lawsuit goes bad and the random people foolish enough to sign up take the legal liability, and the folks behind the scenes take none of the risks and remain hidden.

They are the fall guys. Except the judge wasn’t having any of their BS.

As I understand it (not completely), according to the SHIELD act, the losing party in a patent dispute has to pay legal fees for both sides, which are usually substantial. If the lawyers who really own the patent represent themselves, they are in danger of having to pay out if they lose. So they effectively hired a plaintiff that they could 'represent'. Handing out 10% of the proceeds if you win against halving the costs if you lose is a reasonable hedge.

However a legal firm is not supposed to do that, which is why they are in trouble.

It only took how many decades of technical and IP law experts raising the alarm for this to happen?

Most patent abuse type cases involve litigants who are known / at least honest about their identity.

This case doesn't really solve any of those.

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