Why Rackspace Is Suing The Most Notorious Patent Troll In America

Post by btilly » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #30

hkmurakami wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish. I was under the impression that these patent troll shell companies are set up so that they have virtually no assets under them. Does countersuing even hurt these shell companies significantly? The only thing I can see countersuits costing patent trolls is time in court (ma…

Rackspace is more focussed on having the patents declared invalid than hurting the troll any other way. Eventually you'd run out of patents that are even remotely defensible, because they would have to have been filed long before HDFS became as ubiquitous as it is.

Post by derefr » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 1:22 AM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #24

at-fates-hands wrote: post #22

I'm curious why more smaller and medium sized businesses haven't banded together to form some kind of larger entity to combat these trolls. There's security in numbers. If I was a patent troll and knew if I was going to sue a company like RackSpace and knew they had 25-50 companies standing behind them with a large pool of legal and financial resources, I'd be more apt to try and find an easier target.

> why more smaller and medium sized businesses haven't banded together to form some kind of larger entity to combat these trolls Well, one reason is that it may be illegal. We have antitrust laws that prohibit companies that make up a large percentage of an industry from coordinating in certain ways... this is an edge case but might be a problem. But the main reason is just that it is prohibitively expensive. It's re…

Post by recloop » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

Post by yoster » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 2:56 AM UTC

Post by recoiledsnake » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 3:08 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #42

rayiner wrote: post #4

> In actuality, it is a bit more complicated. Our dealings with this particular troll reach back to December 2010 when IP Navigation Group (IP Nav), as agent for a supposedly secret patent owner, now known as Parallel Iron, accused Rackspace of patent infringement. IP Nav told us that they could not divulge the details of their infringement claims – not even the patent numbers or the patent owner – unless we entered…

It's worth noting that it's very very close to the same tactic Microsoft pursued in targeting Android OEMs. Basically forcing them to sign non-disclosure agreements before letting them even know which patents they violated. Then when Barnes and Noble finally refused and forced (some of) the patents into the open something like 90% of them were found to be bogus. But this was after dozens of OEMs were extorted into li…