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Supreme Court shuts down location loophole for patent suits
Patent trolls have had it pretty easy lately, especially in East Texas. A 2016 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit allowed patent suits anywhere a defendant company's products are sold. The Eastern District of Texas has become a favorite of high-tech patent lawsuits thanks to its rapid litigation timetable and plaintiff-friendly rulings. The US Supreme court today may have put an end to such free-range suit practices, however. The justices involved in the patent case between TC Heartland and Kraft Foods ruled unanimously that patent suits can only be filed in courts located where the target company is headquartered.
Shocker! WiLAN drums up another lawsuit, this time against big cable
As the saying goes, every time an iPhone is dropped, another wide sweeping patent lawsuit in the tech world sprouts up in the plaintiff-friendly US District courts of east Texas. Okay, so perhaps there's no factual basis for that, but who knows if the latest case filed by suit-happy Canadian wireless company WiLAN against Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter Communications is any more legitimate. The dispute is over US patent No. 5,661,602, which is one of the company's 970 issued or pending patents, and was awarded in 1998. It covers "hybrid multichannel data transmission systems utilizing a broadcast medium" -- a.k.a. the broadcasting of data to remote networks and computers. WiLAN has tapped their ole' favorite US law firm, McKool Smith for the case, and asserts that the big cable triumvirate is in violation of the patent, though a spokesperson for Comcast did note they had not been served with a complaint just yet. Sadly (or not-so-sadly, depending on perspective) we can't take part in the gavel swinging, but considering that WiLAN filed suit against Alcatel-Lucent, Sony Ericsson and LG last month, and sued Acer, Apple, Dell, HP, and Lenovo in April, there's plenty of evidence that this outfit's lawyers are the hardest working employees on the payroll.
Paltalk sues Microsoft on patents for tens of millions
Those Redmond Rough Riders have been busy as of late, what with the launch of the Zune and all today. But while Allard and his gang are celebrating the launch of his latest brainchild, his old baby, Xbox Live, is getting sued for patent infringement in the wilds of East Texas. Paltalk, a video chat and community site, sued Microsoft on September 12th for infringing its 1998 patent on "Server-group messaging system for interactive applications" -- but really, doesn't that sound like every other program that talks to a server? The video chat company claims that Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming system stole the idea of in-game chats from Paltalk and wants "tens of millions of dollars" in damages. Now, again, when it comes to cases like this, we invoke the "WANL" (we are not lawyers) clause and postulate that the reason Paltalk isn't targeting a different company (such as Blizzard) is because Microsoft has a market cap of over a quarter trillion dollars, and Paltalk wants some of that pie. We remind the court of public opinion that Blizzard's mid-1990s titles like "Warcraft II" and "Starcraft" came out well before the Xbox and had game-based chat -- we know because a few of us spent many a'night typing things like: "4v4 No n00bs." [Via Ars Technica]
