‘Patent troll’ is
a negative term that is used to describe an entity, which can be a company or
an individual, who challenges the scope of patent rights against suspected
infringers beyond the real worth of the patent.
As this practice became widely known among attorneys and
lawyers, cases involving patent trolling or abuse started to make headlines in
web based news stories. This resulted in increased awareness among the masses,
but as too many stories appeared in such a short span of time, it became hard
for the public to remain interested for long.
Listed below are two high profile patent abuse incidents.
You can learn a lot about this practice by understanding how these cases played
out.
Apple vs Google
These two Silicon Valley giants signed a landmark agreement
in 2014 that settled all outstanding patent litigations among them. According
to their joint statement to TIME, the
companies were said to ‘dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly
between the two companies’. Moreover, they also agreed to work together in some
areas of patent reform, however, this didn’t include licensing their technology
to each other.
Oracle vs Google
Originally, Java was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1991,
and Sun was sold to Oracle in 2010. Android Inc. was founded in 2003 and was
sold to Google in 2005. In 2007, Google released the beta of the Android system,
indicating that it would use some of the Java technologies, and was
congratulated by then Sun CEO the very same day. Google released the android
SDK in November 2007, and negotiated with Sun over possible licensing deals for
Java, but no agreement was reached. After Oracle purchased Sun, licensing deals
were still under discussion, without any final agreement. Oracle went ahead and
sued Google for copyright and patent infringement in 2010.
In May 2012, the jury found that Google did not infringe
Oracle’s patents, and the trial judge ruled that Java APIs used by Google were
not copyrightable. The agreement was reached on zero dollars in damages. But in
2014, the case was reopened and the Federal Circuit partially reversed the
court ruling in Oracle’s favor. This case is still in court and the final verdict
has not been reached yet.
While these
famous patent trolling incidents may be an interesting read, you need to make
sure your intellectual and innovative ideas stay protected against
infringement. 