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Lawyer Behind Failing Sham To Protect Sketchy Patents Sends Bogus Copyright Cease & Desist Notice
Retweeted by CurseYouJeffBezosHat: https://twitter.com/Popehat
Lawyer Behind Failing Sham To Protect Sketchy Patents Sends Bogus Copyright Cease & Desist To Blogger
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Lawyer Behind Failing Sham To Protect Sketchy Patents Sends Bogus Copyright Cease & Desist To Blogger
Free Speech
by Mike Masnick
Mon, Apr 2nd 2018 9:33am
from the a-bit-sensitive,-michael? dept
You may recall a story we had last fall on a really, really obnoxious and cynical scam to protect sketchy patents by "selling" the patents to Native American tribes. The details here are complex, and that original article has a longer explanation, but the very short version is that in 2010, Congress created a special appeals board to review patents to see whether they never should have been granted. This Patent and Trademark Appeals Board (PTAB) has actually been quite useful in getting rid of sketchy patents, which is why people with sketchy patents hate it, and are trying to get it declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But, while everyone waits on that some lawyers came up with a fairly devious plan to avoid PTAB review. It started when the PTAB agreed to dismiss some reviews of patents held by the University of Florida, after the University claimed that it had sovereign immunity as a state organization. The lawyers for the University of Florida, from the law firm of Shore Chan DePumpo based in Dallas, apparently sensed an opportunity. Realizing that a state-controlled organization could apparently avoid the entire PTAB process by claiming sovereign immunity, it realized that companies facing challenging PTAB reviews could potentially avoid doing so entirely by "selling" the patents to a "sovereign" organization, which would then license the exclusive rights back to the original patent holder. Effectively, the patent holder would pay a bit of money to some sort of sovereign operation, but would retain all of the rights as before, just structured as an exclusive license.
The big example of this from last fall was the pharmaceutical company Allergan, which seemed likely to lose some of its patents for the drug Restasis under PTAB review. So right before the PTAB was going to rule, the same lawyers engineered a "sale" of the patents to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. Allergan would pay the tribe $13.75 million basically for one purpose only: to magically exempt it from the PTAB process. As we noted at the time, this really does appear to be a sham sale for no other purpose than to avoid the PTAB.
The sham not only didn't work, it has backfired spectacularly. In February, the PTAB denied the tribe's motion, clearly recognizing what was going on:
{snip}
And because this very story is about the headshot, and because using headshots is fair use, and because we're discussing it clearly, here is the headshot of Michael Shore:
Free Speech
by Mike Masnick
Mon, Apr 2nd 2018 9:33am
from the a-bit-sensitive,-michael? dept
You may recall a story we had last fall on a really, really obnoxious and cynical scam to protect sketchy patents by "selling" the patents to Native American tribes. The details here are complex, and that original article has a longer explanation, but the very short version is that in 2010, Congress created a special appeals board to review patents to see whether they never should have been granted. This Patent and Trademark Appeals Board (PTAB) has actually been quite useful in getting rid of sketchy patents, which is why people with sketchy patents hate it, and are trying to get it declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But, while everyone waits on that some lawyers came up with a fairly devious plan to avoid PTAB review. It started when the PTAB agreed to dismiss some reviews of patents held by the University of Florida, after the University claimed that it had sovereign immunity as a state organization. The lawyers for the University of Florida, from the law firm of Shore Chan DePumpo based in Dallas, apparently sensed an opportunity. Realizing that a state-controlled organization could apparently avoid the entire PTAB process by claiming sovereign immunity, it realized that companies facing challenging PTAB reviews could potentially avoid doing so entirely by "selling" the patents to a "sovereign" organization, which would then license the exclusive rights back to the original patent holder. Effectively, the patent holder would pay a bit of money to some sort of sovereign operation, but would retain all of the rights as before, just structured as an exclusive license.
The big example of this from last fall was the pharmaceutical company Allergan, which seemed likely to lose some of its patents for the drug Restasis under PTAB review. So right before the PTAB was going to rule, the same lawyers engineered a "sale" of the patents to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. Allergan would pay the tribe $13.75 million basically for one purpose only: to magically exempt it from the PTAB process. As we noted at the time, this really does appear to be a sham sale for no other purpose than to avoid the PTAB.
The sham not only didn't work, it has backfired spectacularly. In February, the PTAB denied the tribe's motion, clearly recognizing what was going on:
{snip}
And because this very story is about the headshot, and because using headshots is fair use, and because we're discussing it clearly, here is the headshot of Michael Shore:
Keep going to read the cease and desist letter.
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read