One Man's Battle With Patent Trolls 159
farrellj writes "Dovden Investments, labelled as a Patent Troll by many, got more than they bargained for when they went after Ottawa developer Larry Dunkelman. Mr. Dunkelman wrote BusBuddy, an app that takes GPS and scheduling data from OC Transpo, the local city bus service, and predicts when the bus you are waiting for will actually arrive. But when Dovden came along and asked for $10,000, as a 'licensing' fee, Dunkelman got angry, and decided to fight. 'They claim to have patented the method of using GPS location on vehicles to determine when they will arrive at a certain place,' Dunkelman said. 'This applies to buses, package delivery, airplanes, trains - any business that employs a fleet of vehicles in which they track their location to arrive at a certain place, is open to this patent troll.' Dunkelman hired an intellectual property lawyer and started chipping away at the company's claims. Dovden has since discontinued the suit and are now being chased by Dunkelman and his lawyer for legal costs."
Re:Legal costs and more (Score:5, Informative)
What you are looking for here is something related to barratry [wikipedia.org]. I wish such a concept actually applied in U.S. federal courts, although there are several states that have become enlightened enough that it does apply to those state court systems.
Even more important, I wish judges would actually enforce such a concept and disbar those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, in the "real world" you don't tend to find things so clear cut and lawyers being complete jerks. Usually they know at what point they are going to cross over the line and try to stay on the proper side of that line, even if they may tend to push those limits from time to time. It takes a real idiot of a lawyer who doesn't know the laws of their own profession.
Re:Courts should stamp this out (Score:5, Informative)
A customer of ours was recently sent an "about to call debt collectors" letter for an invoice for toner cartridges they hadn't bought. The scammer had done their homework - they had called previously claiming to be from the "federal government" doing a survey on printers so they knew exactly what type of toner the customer would have bought. We called the ACCC and were basically told that if money had actually been paid then we could try the feds and see if they would do anything, but otherwise they weren't going to do anything.
The fact that the scammers were getting away with this sort of shit with basically no risk at all made me quite angry. Stories like TFA make me feel a little better about the world.
Re:Costs (Score:5, Informative)
Serious answer here, IAAL in Canada. Yes, in Ontario the losing side pays costs to the winning side. However, "costs" is awarded according to procedures in the court rules, and it doesn't actually represent the literal legal costs of the winning party. Court awarded "costs" usually end up being around a third of actual legal costs, but it's still a penalty for the loser. Going by the summary (haven't read the original article yet), I imagine that Dovden will oppose costs because they unilaterally discontinued the action before the court could dismiss the action with costs awarded against them. A plaintiff discontinuing its action is usually seen by defendants as a good thing, so normally costs aren't awarded in these cases.
Re:Courts should stamp this out (Score:4, Informative)
Did they send this invoice via the United States Postal Service? A Demonstrably untrue invoice?
You sir were clearly not paying attention during the movie "The Firm".
I believe that you or anyone else in receipt of such a communication should contact their USPS Mail Fraud team.