Google To Collect $1.3M From Patent Troll

Google will collect $1.3 million from patent troll caught suing its customers. The trick now is getting paid.

The money isn't a significant amount to a company as big as Google, but beating a patent troll on what is sometimes seen as their "home turf" in East Texas is still significant. It will be a kind of trophy case that Google can use to show other trolls that it's willing to fight back hard if they overstep—and that it may be the troll, not a big tech defendant, writing a check at the end of the day.

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Beneficial bought this on themselves when they decided to go after Google clients. I am happy that they won at East Texas. This is chump change for large corp such as Google, but it sends a message.

They'll never collect a dime I'm guessing. These patent troll firms are usually owned by lawyers in a convoluted way that shields their personal assets via shell companies and LLCs.

My wife worked on a case defending a wall paper manufacturer against a patent troll a few years back. When the judge finally realized how ridiculous the patent was, he dismissed the case and granted the defendant's counter claim for legal fees. The case had dragged on for several years before that point so the fees were quite substantial. The very next day, the patent troll "sold" the same patent to another entity they had incorporated for a dollar then promptly files for bankruptcy.

The very same lawyers then filed another lawsuit against the very same defendant citing the same patent in another jurisdiction. They never ended up paying even a dime of the previous judgement against them.

Any sane person would think this sounds absolutely stupid and it is. What allowed them to do this was a federal judge previously ruling the judicial branch doesn't have the authority to invalidate a patent and that power resides only with the United States Patent Office. The USPO doesn't invalidate patents ever They get paid more for every patent they approve and the patent agents have quotas they have to meet. In order to meet those quotas, the agents have roughly two minutes per patent to judge if its valid or not. Patents are written in intentionally convoluted legal language on purpose which compounds the issue. Try reading a normal legal brief in two minutes and see how much of it you get through. Now imagine how much less you'd get read if that same brief was intentionally written to be confusing, overly broad, and full of obscure legal jargon.

It's impossible for our patent agents to actually do their jobs and the USPO is fully aware of this but doesn't give a crap because doing anything about it would harm their revenue. You can mathematically prove the agents aren't humanly capable of processing the amount of patents they claim to fully verify and evaluate yet the system keeps chugging right along approving patents that are blatantly invalid, overly broad in scope, or not approvable due to prior art.

And the wallpaper patent in question? It described a way of making abstract color patterns on paper and textiles via slinging dyes, paint, oils, water, or any other liquids, with or without dissolved solids in them, via manually slinging them at the surface with a paintbrush or a machine that imitated the same results. There wasn't even an invention to patent in the patent application. They literally got issues a patent for splattering anything on any material.

USPO is so messed up you can pretty much patent anything.

FWIW, it's the USPTO, United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Good.