He took on a patent troll and won | Hacker News Reader

He took on a patent troll and won

ottawacitizen.com

52 pointsSG-8 comments

I recalled a similar story involving local transit agencies in the US. Apparently a troll named "ArrivalStar" has been suing local jurisdictions for having the gall to add bus arrival information to screens at bus stops.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/a-new-low-for-pat...

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/04/16/patent-troll-sues-trans...

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/10977955/patent-trolls-ta...

Sure enough, the "Dovden Investments" discussed in this story is just a shell company for ArrivalStar. See:

http://arielkatz.org/archives/2823

Sounds like they used points similar to Kevin O'Connor's RICO lawsuit:

'Lumen didn't do "any meaningful pre-filing investigation"...he company's expert witness not only hadn't investigated FindTheBest's services—he'd never heard of the target company, according to O'Connor.' (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/angry-entrepreneu...)

Compare to:

'The key to his response is that Dovden's case was made up of off-theshelf pieces, careless about details and indifferent to exactly what Dunkelman's BusBuddy app does...' (article)

True Larry Dunkelman's is a Canadian case but it will be interesting to see if there is consistent value in this line of defense against patent trolls.

So that appears to be how you deal with patent trolls. Ignore them, wait till they file suit, then demand they put up $50,000 surety bond to ensure that if they lose you will be paid your costs.

I wonder if you can demand this before getting legal advise?

It's too bad that the definition of 'won' in these cases is usually 'spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, that you will never get back because the troll is a shell company with no actual assets'.

The shell company owns some right to assert the patent. It may even own the patent itself. This right is a revenue generating asset. The shell company should even have records of just how much revenue that asset generates.

Can anyone point me to an instance where an infringement defendant went after the assertion rights or patent ownership? My search-fu hasn't turned up anything in the validity or success of this tactic.

Righthaven (copyrights, not patents) was eventually shut down for lack of standing since they didn't own the copyrights but only the right to sue over them.

In the Apple/HTC ITC case, 5 of HTCoogle patents were thrown out over lack of standing (Google sort of gave them to HTC but retained some control over them).

It could have been much worse, $50K default penalty if he ignored it or his apps and others going off the market.

Despite this being true, "it could've been much worse" and "$50k default penalty" are things that don't mesh with most people's (very reasonable) expectations of rational business.

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