Late last month we talk here on the blog the news about the support of the Open Invention Network (OIN, an organization that protects the Linux ecosystem from patent claims) towards the Gnome foundation on the issue you are currently filing against the Rothschild patent troll Patent Imaging LLC that lives primarily off small business claims and / or lacks the resources for a long lawsuit and finds it easier to pay compensation.
Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC accuses the Gnome Foundation of having a patent infringement 9,936,086 in the Shotwell photo manager. It describes a technique to wirelessly connect an image-capturing device (phone, webcam) to an image-receiving device (computer) and then selectively transmit images with filtering by date, location, and other parameters.
Faced with this problem, the OIN extended its hand to the Gnome Foundation and they are currently in the process of trying to invalidate the patent.
And also recently the OIN has announced the formation of a team with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to protect open source software from attacks by patent trolls who have no assets and who live only on lawsuits involving questionable patents.
This newly created group is intended to support Patentes Unified to find facts of prior use or invalidate patents in litigation related to Linux and open source software.
Thanks to the initiative of OIN, IBM, Linux Foundation and Microsoft, United Patents has created the Open Source Zone group, which will study patents and counter trolls of patents in the areas of open source software.
To encourage patent analysis, Unified Patents has a compensation program to identify the facts from prior use of proprietary technologies. The amount of the reward reaches $ 10 (for the search for data on the past use of the patent that appears in the case against GNOME, a reward of $ 2,500 has been assigned).
According to the data of the Unified Patents organization As of 2018, 49 patent trolls initiated proceedings, defendants where they are relevant to the development of open source software. Since 2012, 260 legal proceedings of this type have been registered. An example of patent troll attacks on STR is the recent patent litigation with the GNOME Foundation.
Unified patents include more than 200 companies jointly trying to counter trolls patents and complicate litigation related to patent trolls, making their attacks too costly due to legal costs.
Patentes Unifieds does not aim to win the case, but makes it clear to the trolls that it will fight and lag behind the interests of its members.
As a result, a lawsuit with a Unified Patents member may be more expensive for the troll than deductions that the troll intends to receive (for example, a successful confrontation can last up to 6 months and threaten legal costs of up to $ 2 million). A recent example is the process that ended in October, in which Lyft's claim was denied and the troll incurred high costs.
The confrontation with the patent trolls complicates the fact that the troll owns only intellectual property, but it does not carry out development and production activities, so it is impossible to give an answer against it related to the violation of the conditions for the use of patents in any product, and it only remains to try to prove the insolvency used in the patent application .
If you want to know more about it you can consult the following link.
Finally, we would like to know your opinion about the type of activity of this type of companies or troll groups that like to live with lawsuits or claims of "supposed" copyrights. Since not only do these types of trolls exist for software patents but they also abound in other areas.