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Taking on a Patent Troll: Caveat Troglodytarum

105 points| kfarr | 7 years ago |bitmovin.com | reply

21 comments

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[+] redm|7 years ago|reply
Good for them. Having been on the receiving end of patent trolls seven times, it's a challenging situation. It's easy to settle, and risky to fight.

To give credit where its due, this aggressive defense strategy dates back to Lee Cheng from Newegg, predating CloudFlare. [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://profilemagazine.com/2013/newegg/

[2] https://www.newegg.com/insider/patent-trolls-learn-mess-newe...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140402/14293426778/neweg...

[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
Newegg was definitely a role model for us at Cloudflare. However, we followed Cloudflare's approach on the prior art search and ethic complain this time.
[+] schoen|7 years ago|reply
The Latin here doesn't make any sense. The post translates it as "trolls beware", but caveat is singular (the plural is "caveant") and troglodytarum is genitive plural (the corresponding nominative plural should be "troglodytae").

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/troglodytes

[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
Thanks. It's been 35 years since I took Latin. I was doing the best I could. Correction taken.
[+] thaumasiotes|7 years ago|reply
Also, "troglodyte" and "troll" are completely unrelated words...
[+] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
Slightly offtopic: I notice this is written by Bitmovin's General Counsel, and Cloudflare has had to defend itself from patent trolls previously (also mentioned in this blog post). Is there a reason YC hasn't taken this on internally, perhaps in partnership with the EFF, with a dedicated resource to defend and then pursue patent trolls for their portfolio companies?

Also, congrats on the win Bitmovin!

[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
That's a great idea! If you have further thoughts on how to do that, I would love to hear them. DM me and we can set up some time to chat, if you are interested.
[+] nimbius|7 years ago|reply
sounds familiar. I work as an ASE mechanic in a small chain of shops in the midwest. We had a deal with a company that provides code readers for long haul trucks. mostly its just to license their expensive software as the readers themselves are off the shelf. we still have to buy pricy laptops to run them on windows 10.

Recently I found out we could read codes using a raspberry pi and an adapter. I rigged up a cool little doctors cart with a monitor, a small keyboard, and the pi. I spent a few nights writing a simple python program that takes codes that are output from the reader and compares them against a database I laboriously typed up for techs to read.

This went all the way to the owner of the company before I found out, but the owner loved it. Later on, after we started culling our software licenses and stopped buying hardware from the vendor, they demanded an audit. The final verdict? we owed then just short of half a million in back licenses and damages for "copying" their patent on reading OBD type codes from an engine computer. Our formal response to their threat of a lawsuit was something along the lines of "try it." I was pretty terrified the whole legal thing was happening, but the owner himself came down to my shop, promoted me to a shop captain, and personally told me to keep making the little readers if people wanted them.

We never did hear back from our old software vendor, but every time someone rolls over a pi accidentally or drops one out of an engine bay, I wonder what theyre up to.

[+] adrianratnapala|7 years ago|reply
This is an encouraging example, not just because they did the right thing, but because they struck a workable balance between pragmatism and good citizenship. From the post, it seems Bitmovin' didn't actually need to fight anything in court. They just did enough legwork to credibly threaten legal action against the troll, who then backed down.

This is a relatively low-cost tactic that others might well employ too. If it catches on, the bar will be raised for trolls, and the business model will become less profitable.

[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
Thank you, that's flattering to hear and exactly what we were striving for.
[+] jlv2|7 years ago|reply
So they are not going to help invalidate the troll's 15 patents?

That means the troll lost one battle but will still win overall.

[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
I agree. However, they other companies sued are much bigger than Bitmovin, so the do have the resources to defend themselves. We have a legal team of one. That said, we did put some links to prior art in the blog post and would be happy to help in other ways.
[+] bdowling|7 years ago|reply
For reference, the case is Hertl Media, LLC v. Bitmovin, Inc., Docket No. 1:18-cv-00938 (D. Del. Jun 25, 2018). The patent-in-suit is US 9,324,365 B2 [0], originally assigned to Nero AG (of Nero Burning ROM fame). The invention in question seems to be directed to parallel processing of multiple langauge assets in a audio/video stream to enable low-latency switching among the available languages during playback.

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9324365B2/en

[+] Aloha|7 years ago|reply
Too bad no one patented the idea of being a patent troll (a business method patent) - and could use to to sue patent trolls.
[+] krc17|7 years ago|reply
IBM patented patent trolling as a business model in 2007, but I like your evil, legal genius.
[+] tutts|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately (or fortunately, really, from a broader perspective) you wouldn't be allowed to use the patent system to bar other people from asserting their rights in court.