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Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

securityweek.com

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Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#21

Post by Natsu »

lrs wrote: post #17
Natsu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kaspersky won on noninfringement grounds, but they structured their noninfringement argument in a very elegant and powerful way that essentially renders the patent-in-suit toothless while still technically valid. Can you expound upon this point a bit? Does that mean that they were able to argue for a favorable claim construction, or was it something else?

I didn't look at the claim construction order so I don't know if anything particularly remarkable happened at that stage, but based solely on the SJ order, it looks like they did get a very favorable construction in light of Ricoh v. Quantas. They were able to get all of the claims construed in such a way that their own behavior wasn't covered. This then allowed them to deploy a very elegant (IMO) "fork" tactic. Havi…

Interesting. Really wish we could see those licenses.

Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#23

Post by orthecreedence »

nhebb wrote: post #22

What impact, if any, does this have on the companies, such as Microsoft, that previously settled and agreed to pay the licensing fees? Can they ride the coattails of this success?

That's what I was thinking too. It'd be really easy for them to terminate their agreements with the trolls and start using the technology free again. My guess is that at least some of them will take this course of action.

Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#24

Post by orthecreedence »

inetsee wrote: post #20
lrs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very expensive. Kaspersky almost certainly paid its lawyers much, much more to take this case through summary judgment and trial prep than Microsoft paid the Troll to go away. Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. But...it's easy to pontificate on the virtues of taking a principled stand against trolls when you're not responsible to greedy shareholders. Does anyone know who owns Kaspersky? It would be interesting to…

"It's very expensive." What I don't understand is why more companies don't band together to share the cost of fighting against a patent troll. The article lists more than a dozen companies being sued by this patent troll. If they banded together their cost would be a fraction of the cost of a solo fight against a patent troll, while the patent troll would have to bear all the cost of proceeding with the suit. It seem…

It'd be very interesting if legal teams from different companies banded together to fight a common foe. I'm surprised this doesn't happen (or maybe it does and we don't hear about it?)

If I was a defendant along with 10 other companies in a case like this, you can bet I'd be calling them up to start a friendly dialog about sharing resources and discovery results (whether they were competitors or not).

I can imagine that for larger legal teams, like Microsoft probably has, they have very strict procedures dealing with this sort of suit, making collaboration with other teams difficult. I don't know anyone on MS' legal team, so this is speculation ;).

Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#25

Post by techinsidr »

krasin wrote: post #18
lrs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very expensive. Kaspersky almost certainly paid its lawyers much, much more to take this case through summary judgment and trial prep than Microsoft paid the Troll to go away. Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. But...it's easy to pontificate on the virtues of taking a principled stand against trolls when you're not responsible to greedy shareholders. Does anyone know who owns Kaspersky? It would be interesting to…

Unofficially, it's believed that Eugene Kaspersky holds the controlling block of shares.

It's well known that he is the largest Shareholder.

Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#26

Post by cantrevealname »

huhtenberg wrote: post #5

Kaspersky is undoubtedly one of most interesting companies in the antivirus space, if not the one. They do a lot of research and they push things forward instead of just scaremongering their userbase into buying annual subscriptions to a bloatware like Symantec does. That being said, they do ship some really buggy stuff that is an absolute pain to deal with. For a couple of years I had to deal with support of a netwo…

They do a lot of research and they push things forward

Indeed, Kaspersky is superb. And if you're in the US, I have another reason to recommend Kaspersky: It is most unlikely that US law enforcement agencies such as the FBI could convince a Russian AV company to whitelist FBI spyware.

Nor will the Russian government cooperate. Can you imagine the Russian government saying to Kaspersky, "Yeah, sure, ignore the FBI's trojan horse, don't flag it".

Of course the Russian government would have leverage to plant its spyware in Russian-made AV. So you would think that buying Russian vs buying American makes no difference. Not so! Think about motivations: If you're an American, the Russian government doesn't care if you cheated on your tax, if you downloaded Hollywood movies, etc.

Buying your security from a different jurisdiction is a way to minimize risk.

Re: Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

#27

Post by vijayr »

lrs wrote: post #13
vijayr wrote: post #11

Surely, Kapersky can't be bigger than Microsoft and other companies mentioned in the article? If they can fight it out, why can't the big guys fight it out? If only the big guys took a stance, and fight these trolls, it'll be nice.

It's very expensive. Kaspersky almost certainly paid its lawyers much, much more to take this case through summary judgment and trial prep than Microsoft paid the Troll to go away. Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. But...it's easy to pontificate on the virtues of taking a principled stand against trolls when you're not responsible to greedy shareholders. Does anyone know who owns Kaspersky? It would be interesting to…

It's very expensive

That is exactly why biggies like Microsoft should fight it out, because they have boatload of cash at their disposal. Today they pay one troll. This will set a precedent, and soon they'll end up paying more and more trolls. But, if they fight from the beginning, it might deter other trolls. They should be able to justify the cost to their shareholders. After all, they make wrong acquisitions all the time, they overpay for acquisitions, they pay heavy fines for behaving badly etc. The shareholders are still around, aren't they?

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