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Comment by Jormundir | Hacker News Reader

IA labs developed their own technology and weren't just suing because they owned a patent, but because they thought their competitive advantage gained from development was being infringed upon. So they aren't a patent troll.

This case does, however, seem to be a solid win for reasonable patent law enforcement. The precedence from this appears to be: if you over-step or over attack using your patent portfolio, you'll pay a big price. Hopefully this will help those defending legal disputes with real patent trolls moving forward.

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This will merely make trolls create shell companies for each individual lawsuit. If a shell loses a lawsuit (i.e. patent found invalid), the winner can just pick up a lot of nothing.

This shell company can not own nothing, it have to own the patent(s) in question.

> This shell company can not own nothing, it have to own the patent(s) in question.

Does it? IANAL but I believe it's possible to license the rights associated with a patent without transferring complete ownership. The shell organization would be a sub-licensee that does your dirty work.

Is it possible to license away the right to sue someone for infringing, though?

I believe it's called "legal representation" :-)

Think this through, why would someone licensed a piece of tech be able to use on its behalf?

This is like saying that I have the rights to use the Unity engine, so I should be able to sue Microsoft for parts of Silverlight that I think are infringing and profit personally.

I'm not saying that all licenses have this property. I'm saying it may be possible to create a custom one that does. For example a "standard" software license (proprietary ... not OSS) does not include the right to sub-license but there do exist software licenses that include that right.

Having a license doesn't mean you can sue. Having a "license to sue" might though! (if it can exist)

I don't think that that is transferable,

In the media-tomb(?name might be wrong, and I know copyright is different) case, the lawsuits were all eventually shut down because the plaintiff, being the 'right to sue' licensee and not the owner, didn't actually have standing or right to sue.

You do not infringe on rights of the licensee, licensee may continue to use the licensed IP, there was no damage inflicted. I believe there's no form of "license to sue" (besides legal representation which is a different thing).

Needless to say, IANAL as well.

It's in the field of copyright rather than patents, but the Righthaven suits suggest some form of precedent in this area.

But that's kind of a sideshow - I believe the real issue being pointed at is if the defendant chooses to argue that a patent is invalid, and succeeds, then the only award they get is the now-invalidated patent.

Don't some do this already? However, the corporate veil can be pierced - it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Yep, and I think that if NPE's annoy the courts too much, that's exactly what you'll see happening.

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