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Dell and Partners Smash Patent Troll WSOU in Court (beehiiv.com) 37

In the land of patent litigation, all patent trolls want to file in the US Western District of Texas Court. This court is infamous for being sympathetic to patent plaintiffs. That's why patent litigator WSOU Investments, aka Brazos Licensing and Development, went after Dell, EMC, and VMware in this Court. Usually, this would have been the smart move. Not this time. District Judge Alan Albright granted the defendants a directed verdict, and that was the end of the matter. From a report: What happened was this: WSOU, although successful before with their carpet bombing patent lawsuit strategy, failed this time. According to the lead defense counsel and Gibson Dunn partner, Brian A. Rosenthal, "This case got to trial because the plaintiff refused to come to their senses before trial. We obtained a number of serious exclusions of evidence prior to trial, and told them very early on the case had no merit." The judge agreed.

That came as a surprise to those of us who watch patent lawsuits, so you don't have to. As Heather Meeker, the well-known open-source and intellectual property (IP) lawyer, said, "This is surprisingly defendant-friendly from Judge Albright, who has received a lot of criticism for making Waco such a patent plaintiff-friendly docket." Until now, WSOU had been very successful. As a Patent Assertion Entity (PAEs), its only goal is to profit by acquiring patents and then suing companies that might be using the patents' intellectual property (IP) assets. It does this by using its portfolio of technology patents to file numerous individual suits involving different patents against companies. WSOU's main tactic, as Unified Patents put it, "forces operating companies to either settle or fight, on average, eight lawsuits at once."

Most companies faced with the financial burden of struggling with so many lawsuits settle rather than fight. Not this time. For the first time, companies decided to take the issues to court. In this particular set of cases, WSOU claimed in a June 2020 lawsuit that the defendants had infringed on three cloud infrastructure networking patents, and sought $435 million in damages. Rosenthal argued that the patents in question were old and irrelevant to the defendants' interests. The defense team had informed WSOU in October 2020 that there was no proof of direct infringement, but the plaintiff persisted with the case, leading to exclusions of evidence prior to trial. So it was that on the first day of the trial, two of the patents were tossed out on evidentiary rulings, and the plaintiff rested its case on the third day. The defense then requested a directed verdict, which was granted by Albright, resulting in a win for the defendants. In short, even this patent-friendly court could find no evidence at all for WSOU's assertions.

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Dell and Partners Smash Patent Troll WSOU in Court

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    In cases like this where there is clear abuse of the legal system, the plaintiffs should have to pay all legal costs of the defendant PLUS damages (maybe a percentage of what they were seeking).

    This would help neuter these worthless companies that don't actually do anything other than scam the system.

    • I would have expected the plaintiffs to have to had paid all costs for both sides themselves, damages would maybe be a separate lawsuit?
      Dell used to be (or still is?) based in Texas, this could have been a factor in the decision.

  • by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @09:38AM (#63332733)
    When you talk to lawyers who are building their own firms, they refer to these kinds of things as "a new business opportunity". They see this as a "business model", ie generating revenue with the model being:

    1) Acquire patents

    2) Sue anyone and everyone

    3) Profit

    They even view the "business strategy" as what these guys do: ie file a dozen lawsuits at once on a company, attack from all directions, and force them to settle, generating millions in revenue. It's the exact same language that an entrepreneur setting up a new SaaS platform or someone developing a new drug would do.

    It's a shame, because there's a substantial difference. An entrepreneur sets up a new product that ostensibly has value to a market that people are willing to pay for. Lawyers add no value to anyone; they just take value. Predatory lawsuit "strategies" are not business, they are a drain on society.

    And unfortunately, I'm afraid this won't change. While companies like WSOU "investments" (quotations mine because that name is utterly ironic) are drains, the worst patent trolls in the country that we never talk about our non-profit academic universities. They benefit too much from this system, and fight change to it. Just try getting a patent out of MIT, Harvard or Berkely without millions in up front payments before you even build a business. So unfortunately we're just left with knocking down the for-profit patent trolls, but the system as is too many benefit from and I fear will never change.

  • Uh, no that's the Eastern District [arstechnica.com], #FTFY

    • by tphb ( 181551 ) on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @10:17AM (#63332839)

      Judge Albright is in the Western District of Texas (Waco), which has taken much of the new patent cases that used to go to Eastern District of Texas.
      While article says this court is "plaintiff-friendly", in reality this court has a specialized IP litigation docket, with processes that expedite patent cases to trial. Some plaintiffs may favor that, but it also benefits defenses to have the court know the ins and outs of IP and to have specific expertise.

      • We still handle a lot of Patent cases out here, hell Longview airport wouldn't survive without all the lawyers ferrying in for hearings and trials. I really don't like the attitude that any court is biased one-way or the other.

        • I really don't like the attitude that any court is biased one-way or the other.

          I don't like it either. They should shut the court down and make all such lawsuits take place in the region in which the patent is being practiced.

      • I imagine if you're a plaintiff with a reasonably strong case, an expedited process would play in your favor. But if you're some species of patent troll, extended litigation is part of the magic formula that makes the strategy work. You want the defendant to feel threatened by the possibility of seemingly endless pre-trial submissions, exhausting discovery and everything that goes on before a trial even starts. As much as it sucks, settling out of court is often simply the more financially viable strategy,

      • Yes there are ALWAYS specialized courts and judges who know certain areas of law better than others. That is very common and normal.

        The problem here is that it is well known in the legal industry that certain courts favour a specific side to a case before it is even presented or heard. And patent enforcement is one of them, and this has been known for 15-20 years. Nothing new here.

  • There's so much hate against these "NPE"s...but seems to me that that's just propaganda from the large corporations that are getting sued by them.

    Why does it matter whether a patent owner is making products with their patents or not? Do you think large corporations that own thousands of patents always use all of them, and don't sue any alleged infringer if they aren't using them for a product?

    If an average person puts in a substantial investment to invent something and have it patented first, but is not abl

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Why does it matter whether a patent owner is making products with their patents or not?

      What matters is that inventors get paid so they can continue inventing more.

      That doesn't happen when the sole purpose of acquiring a hoard of patents is to sue other entities over.

      It's a side-effect of the USPTO no longer evaluating patents on technical merits but just rubber-stamp any and all application and let the courts sort out the mess.

      Do you think large corporations that own thousands of patents always use all of them, and don't sue any alleged infringer if they aren't using them for a product?

      They typically keep a large hoard of "patents" to fend off patent litigation with, quid pro quo style. That doesn't work against patent owners who do nothing but liti

      • "no inventor will get money worth their patent from a troll"

        According to who's evaluation criteria? Like everything else, a patent is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

    • by skogs ( 628589 )

      This is the way it is supposed to be. This isn't the way it practically works though when some NPE jackwagon is doing this intentionally and parasitically. WSOU isn't a poor garage dwelling inventor, nor did they purchase the patents from some poor garage dweller.
      Most often these patents are ridiculously vague and never should have been granted in the first place because they weren't real ideas or products.

      There have been several successful patents granted for variously named cat entertainment devices ...

      • by skogs ( 628589 )

        Dog toy patent: https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com]

        Public Service Announcement: As of 2019, you may now make a stick out of rubber, plastic, wood, or wood composites. It can be stiff or flexible. If you like it can float or be brightly colored for easy retrieving by your dog in poor conditions.

  • Winning one case, and not even in the notorious Eastern District, is not a general fix for the patent trolling problem. What we need to do is set up a specific exploitation requirement on patents: a patent must be implemented as a produced and marketed product, or sold to an entity that can, within a time certain, after which it automatically sunsets. The authority to do so is right there in Article I, Section 8, where the patent system is mandated:

    "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by sec

  • Basically, you are guarding a bridge of your intellectual property. Generally, a patent troll is any single person who holds out against a major company.
  • US politicians clearly have to set priorities in their line of work.

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