Author: Joe Mullin

A once-upon-a-time company called "BusCall" advertised its product in a video, pictured here. Its patents have become the basis for hundreds of lawsuits against companies that use vehicle and package tracking. (credit: BusCall)

The three biggest patent trolls of 2015 will all soon face new legal challenges to their most valuable "inventions."

Unified Patents, a company that focuses on invalidating patents through the use of the inter partes review (IPR) process, has filed challenges against patents belonging to the three most litigious "non-practicing entities" of 2015. In late June, the company challenged Uniloc's patent on DRM. Last week, it filed papers against a company called Sportbrain Holdings, which makes wide patent claims over fitness tracking devices. On Monday, Unified challenged Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as ArrivalStar, a company that has demanded payments from hundreds of small companies—and even city transit systems—for using GPS vehicle tracking or sending package tracking numbers in e-mail.

The IPR process, created in 2012, has proven effective at knocking out patents that the Patent Office says shouldn't have been issued in the first place. Many private companies have used IPRs, as have third-party organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which challenged the podcasting patent.

US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas hears more patent cases than any other federal judge. Last year, he installed a set of controversial rules for those cases, leading to rare public criticism. Changes to Gilstrap's order (Word file), dated last week, suggest some of those rules have been withdrawn.

Section 101 of the US patent laws is what the Supreme Court has deemed bans overly abstract patents. Since the high court decided Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, Section 101 has become more important, since courts have been reading it as banning many software patents that recite basic processes.

Last year, the patent rules for Gilstrap's court held that defendants seeking to file a motion under Section 101 "may do so only upon a grant of leave from the Court after a showing of good cause, which shall be presented through the letter briefing process."

Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) addresses a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton on Saturday. Wasserman Schultz has said she'll resign after the Democratic convention. (credit: GASTON DE CARDENAS/AFP/Getty Images)

Late Friday, WikiLeaks published 20,000 internal e-mails from the Democratic National Committee acquired in a hacking attack last month. The dumped messages, including some that had a derisive tone toward primary candidate Bernie Sanders, roiled the Democratic Party on the eve of its convention and led to the resignation yesterday of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The DNC hack was discovered on June 14, and soon after, some evidence of a Russian connection was found. Now, the belief that the hack was sponsored by the Russian government on some level has been explicitly endorsed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union," Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said Russian hackers are explicitly trying to get Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, elected in November.

"I don't think it's coincidental that these e-mails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that's disturbing," Mook told program host Jake Tapper. The leak took place just after the Republican Party changed its platform "to make it more pro-Russian," Mook added.

(credit: Isriya Paireepairit)

Once upon a time, big tech companies assiduously avoided patent lawsuits. The possibility of "mutually assured destruction" that would come from an endless cycle of suit and countersuit scared them too much.

But several years ago, that fear faded away. In the wake of cases like Apple v. Samsung, massive legal bills have sometimes become worth paying in order to gain an edge over a competitor.

A fast-growing fight between Samsung and Huawei suggests that the next generation of patent disputes won't be limited to the US and Europe. China-based Huawei, the third-largest seller of smartphones, sued Samsung this year in both US and Chinese courts.

Hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang is EFF's newest client. (credit: Pauline Ng via Wikimedia)

Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in 1998, it has been a federal crime to copy a DVD or do anything else that subverts digital copy-protection schemes.

Soon, government lawyers will have to show up in court to defend those rules. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit (PDF) claiming the parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that deal with copy protection and digital locks are unconstitutional.

Under the DMCA, any hacking or breaking of digital locks, often referred to as digital rights management or DRM, is a criminal act. That means modding a game console, hacking a car's software, and copying a DVD are all acts that violate the law, no matter what the purpose. Those rules are encapsulated in Section 1201 of the DMCA, which was lobbied for by the entertainment industry and some large tech companies.

Appeals court that saw through Prenda Law "shell game" says John Steele must pay a sanction related to hiding assets from discovery. (credit: Getty Images)

The US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has found for the second time that the mastermind of the Prenda Law "porno-trolling" scheme should be made to pay sanctions to a defendant.

In an opinion (PDF) published yesterday, a three-judge panel upholds most, but not all, of the lower court's finding that John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, and Paul Duffy should pay more than $260,000 in sanctions. However, they also sided with Steele on one key issue.

Here's a brief recap of the Lightspeed v. Smith case: in 2012, Prenda Law filed a bizarre anti-hacking lawsuit against Anthony Smith, then served subpoenas to ISPs asking for identifying information of more than 6,600 users, whom they dubbed "co-conspirators." The ISPs did not comply, moved the case to federal court, and fought the subpoena.

(credit: Lex Machina)

The number of copyright lawsuits in the US over online file-sharing have dropped significantly this year, according to data compiled by Lex Machina. Data released by the legal research company shows there were 249 file-sharing lawsuits filed in the second quarter of 2016, compared to 517 cases the previous year.

Anti-piracy copyright lawsuits began increasing in number dramatically around 2012 and last year constituted the majority of all copyright cases nationally. The number of copyright disputes unrelated to file-sharing have held steady for the last five years, as shown in the graph above.

Lex Machina defines file-sharing lawsuits as cases having "John Doe or anonymous defendants" and allegations related to file-sharing technology, typically BitTorrent.

Google has ended its legal conflict with a Mississippi state official who opened a wide-ranging investigation into the search giant's business practices.

A dismissal agreement (PDF) filed yesterday in court states that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Google will "endeavor to collaborate in addressing the harmful consequences of unlawful and/or dangerous online content." The document also states that Hood's office withdrew the original subpoena on April 22 and acknowledges that Google "remains subject to the laws of the State of Mississippi and to the jurisdiction and authority of the Attorney General."

The agreement comes after the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled against Google, finding that the search company's challenge to Hood's investigation was premature. However, the appeals court opinion also criticized Hood's demands for evidence as being overly broad, noting that Google tried hard to comply.

Earlier this week, we learned that the insanely popular mobile gaming app Pokémon Go requested full access to users' Google accounts when activated on iOS. Niantic said that it was a mistake, and the issue was corrected in an update for the app.

Yesterday, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter (PDF) to game creator Niantic asking the company to explain that issue, as well as some of the other privacy choices in the game.

The letter notes that Pokémon Go collects profile and account information, location data, and data "obtained through Cookies and Web Beacons." The game also asks permission to do things like control vibration and prevent the phone from sleeping. Franken wants to know what information and functions exist to support and improve services, and what's being gathered for "other purposes."

A software company is founded in 2001, just as the dot-com bust slips the tech sector into a recession. The product never takes off, and the company gives up and shuts its doors in 2004.

A few years later, the company founder is contacted about his patents. Promised a small percentage of whatever "monetization" takes place, the founder sells to a hedge fund. The fund creates an LLC and in 2008, he proceeds to sue several tech companies in the court that looks most promising: the Eastern District of Texas.

Sound like a familiar story? It's happened literally hundreds of times, but a long-running case that just ended this week is special. David Gelernter isn't a typical patent owner. He's a well-known computer scientist who teaches at Yale.  The lawsuit (PDF) over his patents, Mirror Worlds LLC v. Apple, claimed Gelernter invented the basic ideas behind features like Spotlight, Cover Flow, and the Time Machine. The case reached a turning point in 2010, when a jury said (PDF) that Apple infringed three of Gelernter's patents and should pay a royalty of $625 million.