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Forgent Patent Troll Loses Again 95

Posted by Zonk from the system-kinda-sorta-works dept.
anagama writes "Forgent Networks, a patent troll, got the slap down by a TX jury in May when it invalidated a patent Forgent held regarding video teleconferencing over telephone lines, and today, its motion for a new trial against EchoStar was denied. In fact, the court awarded EchoStar $90k in costs. Forgent probably isn't crying that much though, it already extorted $28m from other defendants. Some of you may recall that Forgent made a business out of cheating companies for jpeg use — till their patent was largely invalidated on that front as well."
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Forgent Patent Troll Loses Again More

Forgent Patent Troll Loses Again

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  • Judge Ito - "Order! Order! No more disturbances from the Forgent attorneys. I will hear this evidence."
    Hanna-Barbera - "Your honor, I present exhibit A. Now, if you watch closely on your television screen, you will see George calling in sick to Mr. Sprocket."
    • Oh how soon they forget.....George's boss is Mr. Spacely. The owner of Spacely's Sprockets. The competition was Cogswells Cogs. Clearly you have been neglecting your watching of Saturday morning cartoons. Where are your priorities?

  • Patent reform (Score:5, Insightful)

    by also-rr ( 980579 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @01:39PM (#20204475) Homepage
    Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend. The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated - and unlike copyright the limits on duration are not totally insane.

    However there is obviously some need for reform. If I were starting a business today I would be sure to base it in somewhere like China and register my patents in the US in order to minimise my likely exposure while maximising my potential gain. So what could be done?

    Almost the scariest aspect of the patent system is not the actual law but the consequences of the threat of the law. If you are perceived to be infringing your case could be hugely expensive and very protracted - and justice delayed is justice denied. Being right isn't going to be much help if I go bankrupt before I win! Unless you are a huge company you are essentially screwed by a lawsuit. With the intent of keeping the system essentially fair it would seem to be wise to:
    • Assess the patent dispute in a week or so in a semi-formal tribunal of peers. Appeal is permitted, with (capped) costs paid by each side.
    • Assess the patent in an equivalent of a small claims court over a month or so. Appeal is permitted, with (capped) costs paid by the loser.
    • Full lawyer enriching bun fight - but whoever lost the last round gets to pick up the whole cost until a winner is declared.

    By lowering the cost of patent litigation the risk would be reduced - and we wouldn't have to wait so long or force so many people to pay protection money in the course of business.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Eddi3 ( 1046882 )
      "By lowering the cost of patent litigation the risk would be reduced - and we wouldn't have to wait so long or force so many people to pay protection money in the course of business."

      But if the cost of patent litigation was reduced, wouldn't there be *more* patent trolls because of the reduced costs? There would be less to lose.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kenb215 ( 984963 )
        Not really. Patent trolls don't make money through lawsuits, but by threatening lawsuits. Companies then go and pay licensing fees that they know aren't legal because the fees are cheaper than fighting in court. If it cost less money to fight a bogus patent, more of them would be challenged and invalidated.

        • Re:Patent reform (Score:5, Interesting)

          by eiapoce ( 1049910 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @02:12PM (#20204697)
          The States are seriously in need of a Law Reform. Here in italy if you threaten a suite you'd better be ready to do it. Else the treathened part can sue you back! Treathening a lawsuit without evidence for the sole scope of gaining a unlawful advantage is a felony here.

          • Re:Patent reform (Score:4, Insightful)

            by TheSkyIsPurple ( 901118 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @02:36PM (#20204843)
            I believe it is in the US as well, but the judges tend to take any sort of tiny bit of evidence as evidence that you were serious... ie, give everyone their fair shake.

            That way they don't end up denying the little guy because they didn't all 17-million forms properly filled out in ancient Sumerian on rice paper, with lines numbered in cuneiform (or rather in Roman numerals depending on what your local court prefers)

            Its this "protect the little guy" thing that groups like this take advantage of, since they say "Hey, we're little guys.. and they're trying to take advantage of us"

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by asc99c ( 938635 )
      This sounds like the right sort of idea - making the earliest stage of the process quicker and cheaper. I think another very worthwhile idea would be that as soon as any proceedings are filed on any patent claim, the patent in question should immediately be re-submitted for more thorough examination by the patent office. If the re-examination fails, the case is thrown out before it's begun.

      Too many patents mean that there isn't enough resources to check each one as well as would be desired, but for the sm

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Hotawa Hawk-eye ( 976755 )
        That's an interesting idea. I have another -- I may have heard this before on Slashdot, I can't remember.

        When a person or business files a patent application with the Patent Office, they pay a filing fee. If the Patent Office can find prior art documentation that causes them to reject the patent, the filer agrees to pay them an additional "sorry to have wasted your time" fee. [To avoid the Patent Office rejecting every application they receive, they should be required to file documentation. including exp

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by iovar ( 998724 )

      Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend. The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated
      From http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/us_stat.htm [uspto.gov], 173,771 Utility Patent Grants
      and 20,965 Design Patent Grants just for 2006.

      I want my spaceship...Now!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Timothy Brownawell ( 627747 )

      Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend. The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated - and unlike copyright the limits on duration are not totally insane.

      I don't care whether it can be logically demonstrated. It's been around for quite a while, so the question isn't "logically, should this work", but rather "has this been observed to *actually* work". And I kinda get the impression that the answer to that is "it depends" and "somewhat, but

      • Re: Patent reform (Score:3, Informative)

        by D4C5CE ( 578304 )

        I don't care whether it can be logically demonstrated. It's been around for quite a while, so the question isn't "logically, should this work", but rather "has this been observed to *actually* work". And I kinda get the impression that the answer to that is "it depends" and "somewhat, but not as well as we'd think".

        Links to lots of insightful analysis on this question have recently been posted here [slashdot.org].

    • Re:Patent reform (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rcw-home ( 122017 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @02:42PM (#20204895)

      Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend. The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated

      The patent system was originally an alternative to the guilds, who would keep the important knowledge of their trade a secret from those who wished to compete. Not only was the knowledge at risk of being lost over time, but the guilds actively worked to prevent non-guild members from competing in their trade. So now, we have government-granted temporary monopolies as an incentive to share these secrets.

      The problem is, the "secrets" going into the patent system these days are about as useful to someone skilled in the art as a list of ingredients on a box of food is to a chef. They are purposefully written in an obfuscated manner. One never hears of someone poring over prior patents for enlightenment - in fact, company lawyers often recommend to their employees never to research patents because then they would be knowingly infringing on anything they stumbled upon.

      I believe there are more powerful mechanisms at work that would prevent the reformation of a guild system today if the patent system disappeared. For starters, employees switch jobs much more regularly. Legal limits to non-compete contracts would be effective in keeping this mechanism in place. The Internet has promoted a worldwide culture of knowledge-sharing. Corporate secrets are regularly and anonymously leaked to the public.

      So in my mind the question is not whether patents are necessary to protect knowledge sharing. The question is whether the incentive to innovate would remain, and whether that incentive is truly tied to money. I am increasingly dubious.

    • It's good to see a patent troll lose. But nice though such victories are, it clouds the issue. It raises people's hope that the patent and court systems really can work, and all that is needed is a bit more reform. Cue the various bandaid sorts of suggestions, such as shortening patent lengths, being more careful about granting patents, and whatever. Possibly the best of those solutions is eliminating the patenting of software.

      I remained convinced that the entire idea of "Intellectual Property" is bro

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qrlx ( 258924 )
        I remained convinced that the entire idea of "Intellectual Property" is broken, contradictory, and senseless.
        \strongly agree

        If somebody has some beneficial "intellectual property" and they don't want to share it with the rest of the world, doesn't that pretty much make them a selfish, greedy bastard?

        Intellectual property law enshrines greed and selfishness. Doesn't sound very "Enlightenment" to me; I wonder what our founding fathers were thinking when they came up with it? Let's have a look.

        Article 1, Sec

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Khaed ( 544779 )
      and unlike copyright the limits on duration are not totally insane.

      the limits didn't use to be insane on copyrights, either. They were originally fourteen years. I would have no object to copyright at that point: most every NES game, all 80s music, and every book written up to today's date in 1993 would be legally public domain.

      Give it time for some chode to get patents made engineer's life plus ninety-nine years...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bit01 ( 644603 )

      Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend.

      No it isn't. Since people have not compared it to any alternative, just hand waved without evidence, this statement is nonsense. There is almost no evidence.

      The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated

      No it can't. I open a hardware store in a growing town. It's a new, original idea in a new area. Nobody's thought of opening a hardware store there before. The store is successful and somebody els

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by penix1 ( 722987 )
      Instead of going through all the gyrations you present here the solution is simple...

      Currently, patents carry the presumption of validity in court. The court is taking the Patent Office's word that it has been vetted. When the Patent Office grants patents willy-nilly-neigh, it makes a mess with the current system. Nothing like being found guilty of infringement of an invalid patent! Removing that presumption would shift the burden of proving the patent valid where it belongs. I also believe that just as wil
    • IMHO, your steps (1) and (2) [non-numbered bullets, above] should be done also in the Patent Office, before the patent is granted. And to register a pantent, the registrant should bear the burden of proving that (1) his patent is novel and (2) his patent is non-trivial.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      I would say that actually the patent as a concept is less defensable than copyright as a concept (barring the many procedural and implementation issues).

      The fundamental difference is that if two people working dilligently on a similar idea, one will be granted a 17 year monopoly on the idea and the other will be deprived of his years of blood, sweat, and tears on the basis of who just happens to show up at the patent office first. The patent system ignores that invention is ALWAYS based on other ideas and

  • Watch what happens... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @01:41PM (#20204483)
    [Narrator, Whispering]:
    We've secretly replaced their expensive patents with useless Forgent crystals. Let's see if they notice.

    [Judge, Cringing]
    Ack! I don't like the taste of this one bit - your claim is denied!

    [Narrator, Whispering]
    Well, there you have it - the legal system can still reject some kinds of landgrabs, when they're wrapped in the form of a patent. We now return you to your regularly scheduled eminent domain rulings.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      We now return you to your regularly scheduled eminent domain rulings.

      Ryan Fenton
      Ryan Fenton is my regularly scheduled eminent domain ruling?
       
  • Unless it's two different patent trolls, I've seen this company's name spelled both ways. Which is right?

  • Already extorted? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12, 2007 @02:17PM (#20204731)
    Forgent probably isn't crying that much though, it already extorted $28m from other defendants.

    So with this patent invalidated couldn't the other defendants recover their $28m?
    • this stuff never surprises me but what does surprise me is that someone in the u.s. hasn't decided to fix the situation on their own.. a few years the virginia sniper assassinated a dozen or so people with impunity., greed is what got him caught , he was looking for a grand prize, and the feds never like it when someone wants to take something that belongs to them (money)... with all the loose nuts roaming the streets in the u.s. i'm surprised they haven't taken the law into their own hands already and
      • Um... you know the sniper had nothing to do with greed... actually, I digress... apparently not.

        He was shooting people around where he thought his ex lived to "scare" her. He got caught because he was napping at a rest stop with his rifle in plain sight.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_atta cks
    • when you settle a patent dispute, you don't usually get the chance to make your payment conditional on the patent remaining in force forever. So Forgent can take the money from Motorola etc and run. In the UK, there was a case where a patent was ruled valid and infringed but before the judge decided on the level of damages, someone else knocked the patent out. When the judge eventually decided on the level of damages, the first company still had to pay because the infringement/validity finding was final and
  • How about this for reform? If you file 3 consecutive BS claims, you can no longer file claims for 10 years.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I guess I should have clarified. It's based on whether or not they lose the patent case or submit for a patent and are turned down due to it being BS.

        Whatever the case, I'm sure it would be better than what we currently have going on.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Well obviously I don't know the grounds of rejection by the PTO so I can't answer your first question.

            Restriction orders will not count against them... well maybe they should because most people that file claims are indeed insane and should be restricted from trying again and again... restriction orders count as 2 :).

            If the claim is successfully amended than the case does not count against them unless they roll a 1.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Either you really don't understand.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @06:47PM (#20206621)
      ...or you're the troll. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now. You make the mistake of assuming that patents are filed by genuine inventors and that the patent office actually give a crap about what they pass.

      The scenario you describe is NOTHING like what we see in real life. Dr. X in your situation is absolutely not a patent troll.

      Now, Mr. Y on the other hand, he spends his time (with Mr Z, his IP lawyer) thinking up as many spurious and badly worded patents as possible. He tries to make them vague, but kinda new sounding. Occasionally he likes to throw in something someone else has already done.

      Mr Z sends these off to the US patent office who take his money and grant his patents without researching what they mean or what they really cover.

      Later, Y and Z take companies to court over products which may or may not infringe on these really badly worded patents. These companies are using things that are either standard, obvious or their own invention. A lot of them pay up to avoid court, especially given how rare it is for costs to be awarded to defendants.

      This is exactly what Y and Z want, this is what makes Y and Z trolls. They haven't invented a thing, yet they try to extort money from those that do.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nursie ( 632944 )
          On some levels we agree - I do think that the PTO is failing miserably in its job and have a huge problem with the patents its isuing. The whole "patent troll" issue involves companies who are abusing this.

          Now, if you are of the opinion that as long as a corporationis within the letter of the law then everything is fine with the world then you won't see a problem with this. Some people, however, consider it immoral regardless of how the system is set up, to claim ownership of and money from the inventions o
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • "Why is it immoral to claim ownership of an invention you didn't invent yourself, but purchased from the inventor? Are you suggesting that patents should be inalienable, and only the inventor may ever own the patent rights to his invention?"

              It's not. You're an idiot troll. Fuck off.

              I said that the scenario you paint is not what's happening in the real world.
              • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Nursie ( 632944 )
                  Actually, name calling was the refuge I took when well reasoned argument failed to penetrate the thick outer shell of idiocy that seem to surround your brain.

                  But that's ok, tell yourself I'm the pathetic one when you came to slashdot just to piss off other people, what s asad little life you must have.

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Your Dr. X is not a patent troll. Forgent is a patent troll. So is Acacia. Patent trolls do not have inventors, they have lawyers. They buy up a patents here and there from inventors, and will try to find a company that produces something that is seemingly operating in a business connected to these patents. Then they sue. They will not investigate if the patent covers the business at all, they just start to harass and threaten. It's a very smudgy business, patent trolling, but apparently profitable.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Alyred ( 667815 )
      Essentially, as used in this article, a "patent troll" is a company that does nothing but holds patents, but also goes above and beyond that by registering patents with very little technical background or a very general idea, sits on them for a few years, and then sues the pants off of anyone who uses that idea or technology AFTER said "patent infringer" has invested millions in the infrastructure and has become completely dependent on whatever the patent covers.

      "Patent trolls" will also buy patents off of
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Alyred ( 667815 )
          But until you see the patent at issue, how do you know whether it is invalid or not, without even reading it?
          I guess what I don't understand is the rush to label anyone who sues as a "patent troll" without understanding the patent or the law..

          True, I wasn't defending the OP but defining the statement. However, this company has made a history of doing these practices and while generalizations aren't always true, they do generally have a nugget of truth in there.

          Also, regarding the waiting to sue issue - the

    • Can someone define this epithet?

      What I don't understand is why you have responded to the several people have attempted to explain this 'epithet' to you quite antagonistically and even with abject hostility. It is almost as if those answering the question were somehow insulting you personally, which is just as strange to me as the epithet is to you.

      I'm not going to attempt to explain what has already been explained several times before. You already know the answer, or can figure it out easily enough if you put your mind to it. I don'

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khaed ( 544779 )
        It's pretty clear to me that he can only barely read. Expecting him to have a reasoned discourse with anyone is like expecting George Bush to pronounce nuclear correctly. It's just not going to happen. (Hint, George: There's ONE "u" in nuclear!)

        I looked at some of his other posts, and pretty he's pretty much just a jackass. Or maybe I just feel like bitching at people on /. tonight, I can't be sure.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Since patent is supposed to support the innovative spirit, cant they have different patent filing fee slabs depending on the wealth of the filer?
    Basically, if the patent is filed by an garage inventor, the cost for patenting is much less than if it by a multinational company, which can anyway afford it.

    Thus, by hiking the cost of patenting high enough, we would be able to reduce the effect of patent trolls, or the companies patenting every small thing, whereas, for the individual it would be better since th
  • They're really the only company out there that almost NEVER gives in on these things, even if it makes financial sense to do so. If there were just 10 more companies like EchoStar then this whole problem would cease to exist.

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