Patent troll requires money from developers who use Google Play

Game developer Austin Meyer (Austin Meyer) never thought that he would become a victim of a patent troll. Of course, he knew about the existence of such companies, which are engaged in buying up patents and are building a business on the aggressive use of intellectual property against companies and innovators. But it never occurred to him that the patent troll would sue him personally. And accused of ... using the Google Play application catalog!

However, first things first. In 2012, Austin Meyer posted a game-simulator X-Plane on the Google Play Store, but soon after that he unexpectedly received a lawsuit from a certain company Uniloc . The document stated that Uniloc owns a patent on the very idea of ​​an application catalog.

You read correctly. The law firm declares the existence of a patent for the concept of "application catalog" in principle. That is, it did not have any claims directly against the X-Plane airborne simulator, but threatened to bring litigation to all companies and individual developers who use the Google Play application catalog and upload their programs there. As it turned out, in addition to Austin Meier, she had already filed a number of other lawsuits against the developers of popular Android applications, including Minecraft.

In addition to Meyer, Uniloc has opened lawsuits against Google, Hulu, Valve, Netflix, Amazon, Electronic Arts and others.
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^{Legal action Uniloc Inc. vs Laminar Research, LLC (Austin Meier’s)}

The idea of ​​the application catalog is allegedly described in their patent number 6,857,067 “System access to electronic data”. If you read the text of this patent, the absurdity of the claims Uniloc seems obvious.



But the patent troll does not care about the absurdity of the charges, because their task is to delay the defendant in a lengthy legal process, which will result in large financial expenses. To avoid a lawsuit, many simply agree to the plaintiff’s claims. Austin Meyer did not agree.

Meyer says he started looking for more information about Uniloc and other patent lawsuits - and found out some amazing things. Previously it was known that most patent troll lawsuits are considered in a court in the Eastern District of Texas , even if the particular case has no relation to this region. Now we know why this is happening.

Meyer found out that the judge of this district, Leonard Davis , who in the overwhelming majority of cases meets the requirements of the prosecution, is directly connected with the lawyer of the prosecution.


^{Judge Leonard Davis}

The son of Judge Bo Davis (Bo Davis) represents the interests of many patent trolls when considering lawsuits, as Meyer learned. He has his own law firm, The Davis Firm PC, which deals with patent lawsuits.



It is difficult to believe in it, but it seems that we face a case of so-called nepotism, a rather rare phenomenon in the western judicial system.

In the lawsuit, which lasted several years, Austin Meyer tells in a short video .



It is noteworthy that last year, Judge Leonard Davis announced his resignation from the post of judge. The newspaper The Wall Street Journal found out that the judge is going to work at a private law firm that specializes ... correctly, on patent law.

Probably now Judge David is no longer involved in the X-Plane case, although Austin Meyer himself does not speak about this in his video. The trial continues to this day. According to Meyer, he brought a lot of problems and stress to him and his wife, not to mention the huge financial hole in the family budget. Over the years, he spent on trials about three million dollars!


Patent trolls file 90% of all patent claims in the US related to IT. It uses highly dubious patents of extremely broad spectrum. For example, a patent for a digital document flow with a proposal to companies to issue a perpetual license at the rate of $ 1,000 dollars for each employee who uses a scanner in their office. There were similar patent claims against WiFi hotspot owners and corporate SSL users .

Competently executed letters from patent trolls explain the principle of the patent and describe the responsibility that the user bears for the violation. If he refuses to pay for the license, then he faces a lawsuit, a fine and a threefold increase in license fees for "intentional attempt to evade payment."

Most respondents prefer not to enter the court proceedings in order not to waste time and huge sums to pay lawyers - it is easier to pay compensation, buy a “license to use the technology” and forget about it as a nightmare. Only some especially important companies like Kaspersky Lab give the trolls the surrender , defeating them in court and seeking the revocation of patents. After defeating the patent troll in 2013, Kaspersky Lab told us that it was the only one of 35 companies who did not make a deal with trolls and fought to the end in court: “We won the court against a very powerful multi-level trolley system,” said Eugene Kaspersky, he then showed that patent trolls can and should be fought.

Well, it remains only to wish success to Austin Meyer in his struggle against this legal machine.