Cisco, Troll Tracker Blogger Sued For Defamation 60
Joe Mullin writes "We've discussed Troll Tracker here before — the anonymous blogger who was outed last month as Rick Frenkel, a Cisco lawyer. Since then, two lawyers from the notoriously patent-friendly Eastern District of Texas have filed defamation suits against Frenkel and Cisco, and Frenkel's blog has been shuttered. One of the plaintiffs, a renowned patent judge's son, may have been hunting the anonymous blogger for months. This week Cisco announced new blogging guidelines in response to the Troll Tracker fiasco. The company acknowledged that 'a few Cisco employees used poor judgment' during secret-blog-time, but they're largely standing by their man. Cisco's new rules will prohibit only anonymous blogging by employees about issues for which 'they have responsibilities at Cisco.'"
Good for Cisco. (Score:5, Insightful)
A blog from a technical lawyer is just what the world needs. The only problem could be if the blogger was dealing with issues that concerned Cisco without listing his affiliation. Otherwise, Cisco should have been proud of their employee. It's good they are standing by him and hopefully they will trounce this groundless lawsuit.
Now all they have to do is repudiate software patents and stop cooperating with China.
Re:Good for Cisco. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is this -1. Mod parent up. (Score:2, Offtopic)
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See, it's the Supreme Court that you should be worried about, and to do anything about that, you need to be President(and a little lucky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law [wikipedia.org]
Re:Good for Cisco. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nice PoV...
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Re:Good for Cisco. (Score:4, Insightful)
The 1st Amendment was not intended to, and did not, eliminate the tort of libel.
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What makes you think libel laws abridge freedom of speech? And even if they did, what makes you think a restriction on Congressional legislative power would affect State libel law?
Such a shallow understanding of the Constitution (Score:2)
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Re:Good for Cisco. (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, so I'll ask those of you who are, is there anyway that whistle blower laws could protect Frenkel? He might not need protection from his employer, but he need protection because of who his employer is. He was in a good position to spot and point out foul play and he did just that. Now he is facing retaliation for doing so, isn't that what whistleblower laws are meant to protect?
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Big hand for Troll Tracker (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll Tracker did a public service by documenting these scum. We need to know.
Cisco are doing good by supporting him. Thanks.
Re:Big hand for Troll Tracker (Score:5, Interesting)
According to one of the links in the summary, the plaintiffs are usually represented by lawyer T. John "Johnny" Ward, Jr., and the cases are heard by his dad, Judge T. John Ward.
This reminds me of a bad Dukes of Hazard storyline.
Re:Big hand for Troll Tracker (Score:4, Insightful)
Something about Texan father/son combinations that just makes America turn to shit.
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personally ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:personally ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents should not be awarded to companies, only to individuals.
Historically, patent letters have been invented for a reason: to avoid a master craftsman carrying his trade secrets into the grave. The deal is simple: you get a monopoly on an invention until your death, and society as a whole benefits once you're no more. Simple, clean model.
Awarding patents to companies is a subversion of this model, and is the source of all of our troubles.
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Yeah, I see absolutely no problem with that.
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on death the patent goes to the public domain, duh, problem solved.
How does that solve the problem?
Say your biggest competitor has been granted some hugely valuable patent that it's using to knock you clean out of the market. It's lead engineer is the one who "owns" the patent, and if he dies, it goes into the public domain. And your company is rescued.
See?
Patents are all about saying "only we can do this". There will be always be competitors wanting to open the doors. Generally not enough to kill someone, but....
I'd also ask how you manage it when a company spends mi
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Says who?
Patents are about making sure that good inventions are disclosed before their inventor dies.
Patents as a business model -- the view that you take -- is a distortion of the patent system, and, as I mentioned before, the source of all of our troubles.
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Says who?
Patents are about making sure that good inventions are disclosed before their inventor dies.
True, that's the other side of the coin, and the intended public gain from offering the temporary monopoly incentive.
Patents as a business model -- the view that you take -- is a distortion of the patent system, and, as I mentioned before, the source of all of our troubles.
It's not a distortion -- it's the other side of the exchange. Both are essential, no?
If you remove the incentive, then companies simply won't register patents -- instead we'll just have jealously-guarded trade secrets, and that intellectual property will likely never see the light of day.
So we shouldn't ignore the exchange aspect (which is what makes it a powerful idea in the first place),
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Patents as a business model -- the view that you take -- is a distortion of the patent system, and, as I mentioned before, the source of all of our troubles.
It's not a distortion -- it's the other side of the exchange. Both are essential, no?
No. Protecting the inventors' rights to exclusive control over our inventions is the "price" of retaining inventions for posterity, after the inventors' deaths. Without patents, all inventions would be protected as trade secrets, and posterity would have less benefit. But the "less benefit" is horribly exaggerated by corporate interests who prefer stifling innovation because, frankly, they aren't very competent. CxOs and board members of technology companies, who don't know stink about science or any t
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No. Protecting the inventors' rights to exclusive control over our inventions is the "price" of retaining inventions for posterity, after the inventors' deaths. Without patents, all inventions would be protected as trade secrets, and posterity would have less benefit.
You say "No", but then you say exactly what I was saying? Seriously, here's how I phrased it in the post you're responding to: "If you remove the incentive, then companies simply won't register patents -- instead we'll just have jealously-guarded trade secrets, and that intellectual property will likely never see the light of day."
But the "less benefit" is horribly exaggerated by corporate interests who prefer stifling innovation because, frankly, they aren't very competent
Right, and here's the example I gave of that (again, in the post you're replying to: "many software patents are not protecting technology breakthroughs -- just rehashed combina
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or company charters shouldn't be written to allow companies to exist indefinitely.
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Cisco is handling this issue better then most (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that is important to point out, is that Cisco is treating Rick Frenkel extremely well. They aren't firing him, restricting him from blogging, or taking other knee jerk reactions. What they are doing is requiring that a Cisco employee put boiler plate on their sites.
Cisco itself has been trying to embrace web2.0 collaboration for a couple years now. In some instances like http://blogs.cisco.com/home/ [cisco.com] they do really well, providing a conduit for actual engineers to comment on technology and the companies products. In other instances like second life, they have gone completely off target and missed the whole point (my personal rant, second life is NOT web2.0). The important thing to focus on, is that Cisco is consistently trying to encourage open communications of its employees with the general public, and should be apploauded for their attempts.
Disclaimer - I am NOT a Cisco employee, and these are my OPINIONS.
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This is the only thing an employer should clarify, beyond that, there is only the relationship between Cisco and it's customers, an employer might have some concerns over as it would b
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One thing that is important to point out, is that Cisco is treating Rick Frenkel extremely well. They aren't firing him, restricting him from blogging, or taking other knee jerk reactions. What they are doing is requiring that a Cisco employee put boiler plate on their sites.
Hmmm. I guess I better see what this means for the rest of us.
I consider Cisco a pretty good place to work at and I'm most happy that they're sticking with this guy.
Disclaimer: I am not a Cisco employee, though I am under contract with them.
What can we do? (Score:2)
Plaintiff is Judge's Son (Score:4, Interesting)
The blog is not "shuttered" per se, but viewable by invitation only. Hopefully, Frenkel will continue to write, but it might be hard with the lawsuit.
My Bad (Score:3, Informative)
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You know, the legal standard for conflict of interest is NOT whether or not there's any actual impropriety. It's whether or not there's an appearance of impropriety. They'd better move those cases to another venue!
IANAL, just a private citizen, but it would DEFINITELY appear improper to me otherwise.
IP introspection - go for the named inventors. (Score:2)
2) Get a list of patents applications filed by said clients;
3) Find the numerous cases of clearly prior art for said patents ( it is inevitable that there will be );
4) Directly contact ( escalating though email,fax,phone,registered letter ) the inventors of each prior art'ed patent until you get a response. Make sure to CC their business,the USPTO and of course Albritton and Ward;
5) Publish the prior art and responses on a website.
And
Lot of confusion here (Score:5, Informative)
It seems most of the commentators here have not looked at the filings in this case, or read the numerous articles about it on various legal blogs. It is not quite as is being reported here. The two lawyers who are suing him were representing the other side in a case against Cisco. On his blog, he accused them of altering the filing date on some court documents. That's a very serious accusation--if they did it, it would be both a breach of legal ethics and a felony.
In general, it is very very bad for a lawyer to publicly accuse another lawyer of committing a felony unless the accuser has some pretty damned convincing evidence.
And it is a zillion times worse when the accusing lawyer is counsel for the other side in a case the accused lawyer is working on.
Troll Tracker screwed up big time here (heck, commenting AT ALL on a case involving Cisco is a bit shocking), and is probably going to have to cough up a public apology and a wad of cash. It's not about free speech, as some other posters have suggested--it is a plain, old-fashioned "if you accuse someone of a serious crime, you'd better be able to back it up" case.
There's an informative post about the case here [blogs.com]. That's a handy blog about activity in the Eastern District of Texas. There was also good coverage [businessweek.com] in Business Week.
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WRONG! (Score:3)
No he did not!
I *READ* that blog entry, back when it was available. What happened is that they filed the lawsuit a day before their patent issued, he laughed a little at it, and they refiled. So far as I know, the Patent Troll Tracker never claimed that they "altered" anything (like I said, they withdrew and refiled
The truth is important, not who says it. (Score:3, Informative)
To regroup, this statement on PTT's blog that was so insightful and important that I must have read it three times. The commentor on PTT's blog REALLY made an impression on me, especially the parts about how little our law makers understand the issue at hand. All credit goes to the original commentator on the blog, who in my mind left an impression more indelible than PTT himself:
[http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2008/01/j-carl-cooper-and-technology-licensing.html]:
"As a practicing patent attorney with a large corporation, I can see why PTT and other commentators might want not to divulge their name. His anonymity works for me, because the subject of our interest shouldn't be who PTT is, but rather whether the US patent system is functioning effectively and fairly. And PTT's remarks on patent predators aren't any less germane because the sharks are identified by name, and he/she isn't. Forget that it's Niro (or Acacia, or whoever) that PTT comments on, and focus on the fact that they and others are manipulating an imperfect system to the detriment of both the system and its participants.
BTW, there are those who might defend the abuses written of here as nothing more than "arbitrage". I don't agree. Arbitrage smooths out market irregularities caused by assymetrical information or unbalanced supply and demand. It is ethical, and even helpful, where a market is efficient and the market rules are clear and fairly enforced. The swamp of legal, political, technical and economic uncertainties that trolls are rooting around in (and helping muddy up) is more like an armed prospectors' land-grab than what the patent system set out to be: A reward of exclusivity in return for the useful sharing of information. Vigorous enforcement of patents on trivial or useless "inventions", by contingency-fee opportunists, doesn't make them any less trivial and useless. And bundling or accumulating them under shell corporations, the better to leverage them against companies for whom the expected value of a loss at trial (however unlikely) exceeds the price of a settlement, does nothing to better the "market" for IP. It doesn't promote adoption or commercialisation of technology. It doesn't raise capital in support of yet more innovation. It doesn't improve the function of the patent system. It's extortion, pure and simple.
This isn't an abstract, theoretical discussion. It won't be long before Congress, made up of individuals who understand neither the purpose nor the functioning of the US patent system, begins to tinker with it as if it were a tax code with which additional revenues could be extracted and assets could be more equitably redistributed. Trolls cheapen the patent system in a way that makes legislative erosion even more likely. The abuses PTT writes about call the patent monopoly and its proponents into disrepute, and thereby weaken the rights appropriately reserved under other patents to those who really have made a technical contribution to society. As far as I'm concerned, PTT can call the trolls by name. The moneys they've extracted from productive members of society should be enough consolation for them.
Blog on, PTT!
"
How can a Troll (Score:2)
The whole patent business is just getting more and more sour...