14 DAY TRIAL // The US Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Trend Micro, a cyber-security company, and invalidated two patents that were at the base of a lawsuit filed by a US company that describes itself as a business that "develops and licenses intellectual property."
The company's name is Intellectual Ventures (IV), a business that has bought countless of patents and then filed lawsuits against some of Silicon Valley's largest companies, in the hopes of forcing these companies to pay licensing fees.
The company is what you'd call a "patent troll," but other terms such as patent holding company (PHC), patent assertion entity (PAE), and non-practicing entity (NPE) also apply.
Numerous media outlets have already pointed out that IV is one of the most aggressive and most-hated patent trolls around. You can read reports from Ars Technica, CNET, the EFF, TechRights, Bloomberg, and more if you have the time to waste on IV's business practice.
Six-year-long lawsuit concludes
Trend Micro's problems with IV started six years ago when IV sued Trend Micro for infringing four patents, requiring the company to pay licensing fees for using the technology described in those patents for its email security scanning solutions.
Trend Micro, just like any other tech company faced with a patent lawsuit that they found preposterous, decided to fight back. Their efforts paid off, as IV dropped two of the patents.
"IV dropped claims to two other patents because it likely believed them to not be infringed or invalid," says Felix Sterling, SVP of General Counsel & Global Legal Team. "The patents were deemed invalid because the concepts they describe are simply too vague and unoriginal to be patentable, regardless of whether they are expressed in software."
Trend Micro had invalidated IV's patents
Despite this, litigation continued, and dragged on for years, as patent lawsuits tend to do. Trend Micro's approach was to ask the courts to invalidate IV's other two patents. Their tactic succeeded, and the US District Court of Delaware, and later the US Court of Appeals, sided with the company and dismissed the latest two patents.
Identified as US Patent Nos. 6,460,050 (’050) and 6,073,142 (’142), these two describe (1) the generation of a digital identifier to assist email filtering, and (2) "an 'automated post office,' which enables the analysis and filtering of vetted emails recognized to be unsafe."
Trend Micro: Why are untrained jurors judging patent disputes?
Sterling, while happy with the lawsuit's outcome, argues that's time for a reform of the patent system. Others have argued the same in the past, and more and more high-profile companies and individuals are adding their voice to this chorus.
Sterling's gripe is based on the fact that these lawsuits are decided by jurors and not professionals. He argues that the fate of companies is in the hands of untrained citizens who, most of the time, have no clue about what's being discussed in these highly technical proceedings.
"The truth is that these patent speculators – and there are probably more of them than you think operating in the U.S. today – are overburdening our court system with their overreaching patent claims in the hope that the winds of chance will keep blowing their way often enough to make it worth their efforts," Sterling writes.
"It’s a judicial system already stretched to the limit and struggling to provide a quality service to the taxpayer, and obviously was never intended to serve as a platform for this dubious industry."
The good news is that, slowly, even the US judges that rule on these cases are beginning to see the problem with patent troll companies that hoard old technology patents, while never creating any new "intellectual property" on their own, or even attempting once to use the collected patents to manufacture products.