Kaspersky Lab Forces 'Patent Troll' To Pay Cash To End Case (arstechnica.com) 108
In October, Kaspersky Labs was sued by a "do-nothing patent holder in East Texas who demanded a cash settlement before it would go away," reports Ars Technica. Today, founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky said his company has defeated five patent assertion entities, including the infamous claims from Lodsys, "a much-maligned patent holder that sent demand letters to small app developers." The patent-licensing company who sued Kaspersky Labs in October was not only defeated, but they ended up paying Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. From the report: The patent-licensing company, Wetro Lan LLC, owned U.S. Patent No. 6,795,918, which essentially claimed an Internet firewall. The patent was filed in 2000 despite the fact that computer network firewalls date to the 1980s. The '918 patent was used in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation called an "outrageous trolling campaign," in which dozens of companies were sued out of Wetro Lan's "headquarters," a Plano office suite that it shared with several other firms that engage in what is pejoratively called "patent-trolling." Wetro Lan's complaints argued that a vast array of Internet routers and switches infringed its patent. Most companies sued by Wetro Lan apparently reached settlements within a short time, a likely indicator of low-value settlement demands. Not a single one of the cases even reached the claim construction phase. But Kaspersky wouldn't pay up. As claim construction approached, Kaspersky's lead lawyer Casey Kniser served discovery requests for Wetro Lan's other license agreements. He suspected the amounts were low. Wetro Lan's settlement demands kept dropping, down from its initial "amicable" demand of $60,000. Eventually, the demands reached $10,000 -- an amount that's extremely low in the world of patent litigation. Kniser tried to explain that it didn't matter how far the company dropped the demand. "Kaspersky won't pay these people even if it's a nickel," he said. Then Kniser took a new tack. "We said, actually, $10,000 is fine," said Kniser. "Why don't you pay us $10,000?" After some back-and-forth, Wetro Lan's lawyer agreed to pay Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. Papers were filed Monday, and both sides have dropped their claims.
ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the patent troll forgot to include non-disclosure it seems.
Obviously quality lawyering there.. Smart, Real smart.
But lets not forget, Kaspersky is EVIL now remember? EVIL RUSSIANS!
How dare they try and undermine such an upstanding and fine American institution as patent trolling!
Re:ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need evil Russians, that's the only way we can keep the content of leaked DNC emails buried under a thick layer of mass hysteria. They're also very convenient as a distraction for people who still have their panties in a bunch because they lost their elections to a reality TV star.
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Because things the Trump administration stand for like destroying net neutrality are so good for the tech industry!
Re:ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please do explain how allowing Comcast to limit traffic from services like Netflix will give them any incentive to provide a better overall internet service.
Re:ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:4, Informative)
I do not think GP actually claimed any such a thing. What GP claimed is that the paying for bandwidth may bring some massive improvements for people with money. There is a difference between the two.
That's a misunderstanding of free market economics. A company receiving money has no connection to that company then spending money to improve their service - for a company to spend money there must be an additional incentive to do so.
If a company can simply force Netflix etc. to pay extra to not cripple their service, or force a user to pay extra to not cripple their service, or force users on to their own video service because they've crippled Netflix, and there is no local competitors because of high barriers to entry, then what incentive is there to spend that extra money on improving their service?
Doing so would not generate any extra income, so the free market economics of the situation virtually forbids the company from doing so.
the pain level in the general population has to be high enough to hang he said legislators if they do not do what populace wants. Only this works.
Comcast topped 24/7 Wall St's list of America's most hated companies last year, how much pain do people need to endure? Why should we just shrug our shoulders and let people lie about the situation when there is proof from every other industrialized country that regulation forcing competition in the telecoms sector improves performance and reduces cost to consumers?
Re: ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:1)
It's just mental gymnastics to try and explain how blatant anti consumer practices benefit the average consumer because muh team said so
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Franchise Agreements (which give CableCo Monopoly power) are anti consumer, lets start by eliminating them. Hum?
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Please do explain how allowing Comcast to limit traffic from services like Netflix will give them any incentive to provide a better overall internet service.
Can you explain how Comcast got into the position where it could do such a thing? Until you look at the CAUSE of the problem (Franchise Agreements between Governments and Providers), you're going to look to the same people (Government) that caused the problem, for the solution to the problem.
The answer is much more simple than that, end Franchise Agreements and start building Municipal Infrastructure that can be accessed by ANY vendor, and ANY Consumer and actually offer the competition that solves the prob
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Can you explain how Comcast got into the position where it could do such a thing?
Sure, that's easy! It's because the US lacks regulations that force providers who have local infrastructure monopolies to share their lines with competitors at a wholesale market rate.
The answer is much more simple than that, end Franchise Agreements and start building Municipal Infrastructure that can be accessed by ANY vendor, and ANY Consumer and actually offer the competition that solves the problem naturally.
Well, sure, if you want the government to spend all that money building its own infrastructure that duplicates existing infrastructure, but that's not exactly the most efficient way to go about it...
Again, without understanding the problem (last mile monopoly) you're gonna only offer solutions that are going to cause loads of additional problems, which according to how things are currently playing out, will lead to more regulation, more government, and more control. Please see the Historic Definition of Fascism.
You want to see how my solution would play out? Just look at most other industrialized countries, they have regulation to force c
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It's because the US lacks regulations that force providers who have local infrastructure monopolies to share their lines with competitors at a wholesale market rate.
There you go again, thinking Government is the solution to the problems it has created. The solution isn't there, it is in the last mile wire/fiber.
We should be viewing the last mile, the same way we do with Roads, being Infrastructure. Provide the Infrastructure to any provider who wants to use it. Back haul all the fiber to a COLO and let the competition start there. Last mile infrastructure managed by the local Municipality.
Once you have a build-out of the infrastructure, you'll have a whole slew of new
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There you go again, thinking Government is the solution to the problems it has created. The solution isn't there, it is in the last mile wire/fiber.
I find it very strange you keep saying that, when your own solution is for Government to spend vast amounts of time and money building and running new infrastructure that duplicates existing infrastructure.
You have to decide which it is, is Government the problem or the solution? You can't have it both ways.
We should be viewing the last mile, the same way we do with Roads, being Infrastructure. Provide the Infrastructure to any provider who wants to use it.
Both of our solutions give the same result, however mine (i.e. the solution used by most other industrialized countries) would cost virtually nothing to the tax-payer and show results in years, while you
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Have you ever had the chance to work on commercial high bandwidth / low latency networks? The kind that give you a lower latency between NYC and LA offices than the one you get between computers on your home LAN
Have you?
That is not possible. You would need physics-breaking FTL transmissions to make it so. Straight shot speed-of-light from NYC to LA is about 13ms. Even consumer-grade networking equipment has latency of under one millisecond. On busy modern corporate networks, latency is still sub 5 milliseconds. That does not even count distance-by-wire and speed of propagation, both of which dramatically increase latency in the real world.
Trust me, I have a background in network design, know physics, and can do ba
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Once you're done talking about your math skills, can you point out the place in my post where I compare long-distance and local corporate networks? or where I talk about consumer networking equipment?
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Poor old Eugene. He's dealt with this kind of hysteria before, from Russia as much as anyone else. He's dealt with worse from them than hysteria too.
Security is a bum game, there's always someone trying to gain political leverage in a way that undermines your good work. You're best off either being as fake as possible like John Mcafee or completely invisible.
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The real patent troll is the USPTO. Clearly it is far right psychopathic policy to allow as many patents through as possible regardless of validity, basically the plan a US tax on the rest of the patent. They make money out of approved crap patents, they make money for their lawyers and courts and of course they run extortion schemes for as long as possible tied to bad patents. This is clearly no an isolated incident but reflects a long term pattern of extremely corrupt behaviour by an extremely corrupt gov
Coming soon... (Score:3)
Other litigation from "payees" which will hopefully put one (of unfortunately many) patent troll out of business. I would also hope that the people bringing fraudulent litigation against companies see at least the threat of criminal charges for fraud.
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Comrade, our land doesn't have nuances such as yours. e.g. France helping you to separate from England. Your flag has been showing the same blue-white-red colors as France ever since then as recognition. Of course, the number of stars on the flag has varied.
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France pretty much created the US. I only learned English when I was 21.
Re: ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:2)
The headline says they settled.
Re:ROTFL - no NDA? (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare they try and undermine such an upstanding and fine American institution as patent trolling!
They didn't. They made the patent troll part with $5000. A responsible company would have gone to court and get all the patents invalidated to prevent the troll feeding on other victims.
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You don't understand what a company is _for_, that's obvious. They aren't created to make the world a happy place.
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I understand exactly what a company is for. I also understand why therefore they should not be put on some pedestal. They did the bare minimum and even scored $5000 for their efforts. Nothing more.
No trolls were hurt in the making of this crappy story, and Kaspersky deserves absolutely no credit for anything.
Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Now we know what law firm to go to if we are ever targeted by a patent troll.
I've had a patent troll on my case before and it is one of the most annoying pitfalls of doing business in the USofA. The plaintiff was some invisible company that got ahold of some ARCnet patents from a defunct workstation maker and thought they could nail every Ethernet product maker. We were small potatoes they wanted 3Com and Intel.
Fortunately this particular claim was so specious that it didn't go anywhere. Still annoying.
What's your patent troll story?
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
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This.
There's a word for what patent trolls do, and the word is "extortion". You don't extort from people who are likely to put up a fight.
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They don't want 3Com and Intel because ...
Actually I think they actually did. This is last century and the patent trolling industry was much earlier on. You are right that they did want us to buckle under and expected us to because we didn't have the resources to fight much. However not because they would really make any money off of us but because their strategy was to get enough companies like us so that it would bolster their claims against the big guys doing big volume.
As far as I know that strategy doesn't work (today) but with what litt
It's time to start reviewing software parents (Score:5, Insightful)
Every software patent. If you can't make a good case as to why you should have the patent, it's gone. I think we'd lose 99% of the patents, because 99% of them are bogus.
Software parents? (Score:2)
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Personally, I think that 100% of software patents should be invalid, both for technical and legal reasons and because software patents cause a huge amount of harm to society.
in your face (Score:5, Funny)
The name of the inventor on this patent is Steven T. "Trolan".
They're not even subtle about it!
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But how? (Score:2)
How are software patents still a thing in these backwards jurisdictions?
Re: But how? (Score:1)
Because mystery magic science tech + old crotchety tech illiterate judges = settlements
Re:But how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mostly because its difficult to knock off the patent trolls that nobody wants, without also inadvertently harming the big patent holders such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc who all hold hundreds if not thousands of patents that they don't actually practice in addition to the hundreds or thousands that they do practice.
So you can't just add a law like "non-practicing patents are not actionable" or anything like that without pissing off those big campaign contributors and you end up in kind of an "I know it when I see it" scenario where its usually pretty obvious when someone is a patent troll, but writing it up in legal language that's both strong enough to matter and still specific enough to only harm the abusers.
Of course the real solution is to just not issue shitty patents in the first place, or at the very least be more willing to invalidate them when its shown that they're shitty. That has the same issue of inadvertently harming the big political contributors though so its even less likely to happen since its basically the same solution just kicked up the line a bit.
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writing it up in legal language
... is difficult.
Re:But how? (Score:5, Insightful)
*ahem*
I don't disagree with what you wrote, but you seem to have missed the point.
This is not about non-practising patents. This is about Software Patents, which are utterly immoral and should not exist in any form.
Re: But how? (Score:2)
Amen.
The ownership of ideas is immoral.
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By what metric? Some cultures have historically treated the ownership of physical property as immoral. They've mostly all been wiped out by those of us who happily shoot anyone who infringes on our property rights, including people who don't believe in such.
And other cultures (including our own!) have historically considered the ownership of people to be perfectly fine. We still have no problem with owning animals.
Why should it be "immoral" to own ideas but fine to own livestock? Certainly current US la
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At a minimum, software patents do not require revealing the method. If there's no working code, there should be no patent.
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You're complaining about the current practice of software patents. That could be fixed. GGP was calling software patents immoral and said they should not exist in any form.
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Ahem, if you're NOT trolling then you are terminally ignorant.
1) Software is copyrighted already.
2) It's now almost entirely Trade Secret.
So why should they get Patent too?
As to the mechanism of patents, to get an engineering patent you have to give the blueprint. If you built a better moustrap you can't patent the goal of the device, you have to show how it's built. But no software patent shows its blueprint (the source code) and they only "patent" the goal.
Maths is not patentable. Software is 100% absolut
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Note: each time I see the above argument quoted in an internet-based discussion [and not just by me, since this is a widely-held view] there is invariably a response along the lines of, "Wait - when that particul
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Software patents should be disallowed because they fall into two categories that were never intended to be patentable: math and algorithms.
Allowing software patents is bad socially because they have the opposite effect of what patents are supposed to do. Patents are supposed to benefit society as a whole by giving an incentive for inventors to publicly reveal their inventions so others can build on them.
Software patents don't do this.
The appropriate IP protection for software is copyright.
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IMO it's a gray zone. Using software just as using mechanics in a novel way in a novel system? IMO clearly worthy of a patent but (as Dog-Cow points out below) the source code should be included or at least a complete algorithmic description that others can implement and improve upon. But most software patents aren't like that.
Re:But how? (Score:4, Interesting)
If all those large patent holders lost their patents at the same time, no one would be harmed.
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Yes they would. They would all be harmed approximately equally to each other, but the real harm would be the sudden possibility of startups that no longer had to try and wade through the patent minefield, and fewer ways to strangle any startups that get past the "startup" phase and begin to look competitive.
Of course in this case, I mean "harm" from the perspective of the companies in question. Society as a whole would likely benefit from the increased competition. Unfortunately the US government cares f
Re:But how? (Score:5, Informative)
Trogre asked:
How are software patents still a thing in these backwards jurisdictions?
Article I, section 8 of the U.S. constitution states that, among many other powers granted to it, Congress shall have the power: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Using another power granted to it by Article I, section 8, Congress created the now-voluminous corpus of Federal law known as the U. S. Code. Title 35 of that code - which has been amended several times since its inception - established the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office to administer the Federal grants of exclusive rights to authors and inventors. The duration of those grants is also set by Congress (and has been steadily increased with each revision to Title 35 since the passage of the first Patent Act in 1799). What "inventions" are eligible for patent protection is defined in TItle 35, beginning with section 101.
Whether a patent application is granted or not is determined by patent examiners, who are members of the Patent and Trademark Office staff, and who are assumed to be competent to judge the patent-worthiness of an application. Decisions of patent examiners are subject to challenge - and patents wrongly granted can be recinded - but the process is cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive, so challengers without deep pockets and strong motivation are rare.
Most knowlegeable parties agree the current system is profoundly broken, but, because it's up to Congress to fix it, and a lot of patentholders are also major political campaign finance contributors, nothing fundamental to that system has been seriously revisited in the context of lawmaking in modern times. Nor is it likely to be in the near future.
IANAL ...
In Russia (Score:5, Funny)
In Russia, patent trolls pay you!
Re:The term game-chaning is thrown around too ofte (Score:5, Interesting)
I've long suspected that more than a few patent trolls have paid off the defendants to get out of a suit gone wrong, but always the "settlement" comes with the condition that the defendants not talk about it. What's game-changing about this one is that there's no non-disclosure agreement, Kaspersky's free to publicize exactly who had to pay how much to make the suit disappear. That opens the door for other defendants to counter patent trolls' record of "settlements" (used as evidence of the strength of their claims) with "Show how those "settlements" aren't just like the one with Kaspersky.".
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I disagree. Not only is this not game-changing, this is actively maintaining the status quo.
Good for Kaspersky! (Score:4, Informative)
Way to go guys. Every time a troll gets his ass whooped, it's good for the rest of us.
Thanks!
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Way to go guys. Every time a troll gets his ass whooped, it's good for the rest of us.
Thanks!
No it's not. No one got their ass whooped here. Kaspersky had the chance to drag this to court and get the patents invalidated. Instead he made the company part with the Friday afternoon petty cash drinking fund and next week they're free to go find other victims.
Kaspersky had the opportunity to do some good and instead took some money to go away and leave a patent troll be. Fuck both sides of this story.
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Risk is a function consequence and likelihood. Given the troll paid someone $5000 to forget this just happened, what about this situation make you think the likelihood of them winning was anything above 0?
The consequence may be high, but the risk was low.
Re:Good for Kaspersky! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree. I imagine though that Kaspersky is not that interested in spending money in the US to primarily benefit US entities. Probably something about "the US gov sez avoid Kaspersky" disinclines them to do so.
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Except nobody's ass got whooped. The troll had to pay an amount that is essentially chump change. They certainly didn't get hurt.
Taking the case to court -- that would have resulted in an ass-whooping.
Alternative story (Score:5, Funny)
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"A Russian company with close ties to KGB squashes a patent troll, remains a Russian company with close ties to KGB. The Congress will still advise anyone who's not out of their minds not to trust their computers to the Russian company with close ties to KGB".
FIFY.
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The KGB and NSA aren't interested in trivial crap. Normal business is safe, just remember you're being watched by Big Brother and avoid anything that can get you in trouble.
So patent troll can now continue to troll others ? (Score:2)
Looks like it. The patent is still valid. Others might not be as resilient in fighting the patent. So the troll can continue to extort money from unsuspected victims.
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This was my thought. Didn't they have any options to take out the garbage?
They could have continued the case, but I suppose with there is always a chance that it will be held in some red-neck court house and that they could lose. From their point of view I can see why they took the money and left
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Kasperky almost certainly would have won. The reason that they took the money instead of fighting was probably because they would have spent a lot of time and treasure on the path to their victory.
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Could the defendant have continued the case? I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of US civil lawsuits. The biggest threat Kaspersky seemed to have was to force discovery, getting information that the troll didn't want getting out.
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Yes? However this should significantly weaken the patent in a reasonable court.
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Love it! (Score:2)
It's a shame... (Score:3, Insightful)
Great for Kaspersky, what about everyone else? (Score:2)
This is not that great of a thing. That Kaspersky walked out with $5000 may be great for them, they got their pound of flesh, but a responsible company would have forced litigation and invalidated the patent so this troll couldn't do this to anyone else... My already neutral opinion of Kaspersky just got lower. Seeing who is better at shaking the other down for money is a third world tactic. Here in the West we try to strive for fair play (in theory).
Too bad (Score:2)
It's too bad that Kaspersky took the money (and such a small amount of it, too). It would have been to the benefit of society at large if they'd insisted on taking it to court.