Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

[News] The Acacia Patent Troll Rips Yahoo! Off

  • Subject: [News] The Acacia Patent Troll Rips Yahoo! Off
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:45:35 +0000
  • Followup-to: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/4.3.1
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Yahoo Loses Patent Infringement Case, $12.4 Million

,----[ Quote ]
| IMVironments - the little background themes 
| for Yahoo Messenger - have gotten Yahoo in a 
| lot of trouble.  The company's lost a patent 
| infringement case that concerns them, and as a 
| result, is supposed to pay a subsidiary of 
| Acacia Research Corporation $12.4 million.
`----

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/02/03/yahoo-loses-patent-infringement-case-124-million


Recent:

Paul Ware and Acacia

,----[ Quote ]
| Ware and Financial Systems Innovation, LLC (a subsidiary of Acacia, formerly
| a subsidiary of TechSearch, the company now known as Global Patent Holdings)
| have filed 10 patent litigations in the last four years, against 144
| defendants. Friedman, Suder & Cooke is representing Ware and Acacia in all of
| the litigation, most of which are pending either in the Northern District of
| Georgia or Northern District of Texas. The big filing was one last June
| against 106 defendants, which I reported on here. While 3 of Ware's cases
| were settled, the rest were stayed pending the first reexamination. There are
| motions in each of those cases to lift the stay. Some are being granted, but
| in other cases, more trouble brews.
`----

http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2008/01/paul-ware-and-acacia.html


Related:

When Patents Threaten Science

,----[ Quote ]
| Patents should not be used to protect laws of nature, products of
| nature, or mathematical formulas.
`----

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5804/1395


Sprint Nextel, Acacia unit settle patent suit

,----[ Quote ]
| A subsidiary of Acacia Research Corp. and Sprint Nextel Corp. have settled a
| lawsuit alleging that Sprint Nextel had infringed on patents for technology
| used to display mobile vehicle information on maps.
`----

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/local-news/kansascity/2008/01/02/sprint-nextel-acacia-unit-settle-patent-suit


Top Ten Patent Trolls of 2007

,----[ Quote ]
| 3. Acacia. I didn't start tracking Acacia carefully until the summer. But
| still, on my blog I have reported on over two dozen lawsuits brought by
| Acacia this year, against more than 235 defendants. That's in addition to the
| over 200 lawsuits Acacia filed in previous years against hundreds and
| hundreds of defendants. And that's not including the two lawsuits (at least)
| Acacia has filed in December against 20 more defendants (yes, Acacia, I'm
| watching you). Acacia's business model, as a publicly traded company, is to
| accumulate patents and sue as many companies as possible in order to extract
| licenses. They have a market cap of over 275 million - that pays for a lot of
| lawsuits. Unlike other trolls, Acacia tends to not focus on one court in
| particular, although they have sampled the Eastern District of Texas more
| this year than in the past.
`----

http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-ten-patent-trolls-of-2007.html


Yahoo Patent Troll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvFUSHwRXJE


Who is the world's biggest patent troll?

,----[ Quote ]
| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."
`----

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20


Playing Microsoft Patent Poker

,----[ Quote ]
| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con â convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.
`----

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616


,----[ Quote ]
| "There you have it. At least a third of SCO's entire market
| capitalization, and their entire current cash reserves, is payoffs
| funnelled from Microsoft. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of
| cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new
| SCO source business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill
| for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail."
`----

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween10.html


Friday Patent Litigation News

,----[ Quote ]
| Reader Anthony Sabatini of New York writes to tell me that the auto-text
| patent asserted by Acacia subsidiary AutoText in Cleveland might be invalid
| in light of the Control Data Corp CDC6600 console system developed two
| decades earlier.
|
| [...]
|
| Finally, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. -- in other words,
| ACACIA -- filed a lawsuit in Marshall against Google, accusing Google's
| search engine and Google Earth of infringing two patents. This is the same
| Acacia sub that sued Red Hat and Novell over Linux, with the same lawyers -
| Johnny Ward and Eric Albritton. But these are different patents. The patents
| asserted against Google are 5,276,785 and 5,675,819, which Acacia got from
| Xerox. Nice going, Xerox.
`----

http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/11/friday-patent-litigation-news.html


Acacia and Niro File Another Multi-Defendant Lawsuit on JPEG-on-a-Website
Patent, Bringing Total to 16 Companies Sued

,----[ Quote ]
| Assuming it files one per month for the next 39 months until the patent
| expires, then what Acacia is really seeking is $600M from US industry for the
| JPEG-on-a-website patent. My guess is theyâll sue many more companies than
| that, and seek up to a billion dollars â which, assuming a 33% contingency
| fee (which is low, probably), amounts to a cool $100 million per year for the
| Niro firm.
|
| And people wonder why heâd like to shut down websites critical of Acacia and
| other patent trolls. The real question is what does he want from you and me,
| for our photo blogs, our personal websites. His statements to IP Law 360 only
| referred to companies.
|
| The other real question is how many companies will spend millions in
| attorneys fees to fight rather than pay the $500K or $1M or $2M that Acacia
| is demanding. That's the sad state of patent litigation these days.
`----

http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/acacia-and-niro-file-another-multi.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAktqpU8ACgkQU4xAY3RXLo4roACgtOjczqw3JLGvo7edrBhthRAN
Q/AAn25Uhoe5799hMwLuhUfK66mRTqYu
=gL5q
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index