4 Utterly Ridiculous Patent Law Cases

Crime

Patent troll” has become a common term in the business world, where patent infringement lawsuits are becoming an everyday occurrence. Many large companies have huge stables of patents and defend their claims rigorously and legitimately.

Some patents are incredibly broad and the holders sue multiple companies trying to get someone, somewhere, to hand over some money.

Other firms buy up multiple patents and focus their efforts on aggressively defending these patents, with no intention of ever developing or producing the technology they cover.

This is a profitable enterprise because, right or wrong, it’s cheaper for most companies to settle than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves against patent infringement cases. Settlement rates for tech patent lawsuits, in fact, may be as high as 90 percent of cases filed.

Plaintiffs usually count on the defendant’s willingness to settle; it’s what makes these types of cases so common. It also leads to some entertainingly bizarre claims and defenses, as in the following cases.

1. The 2001 defense
Apple is suing Samsung over the appearance of Samsung’s Galaxy tablet computer, which it says copies the iPad’s “unique and novel ornamental appearance” and use of icons. Samsung’s defense? That Apple did not invent the design of the iPad.

As proof, Samsung’s lawyers offered a scene from the classic 1968 science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which the astronauts use what appears to be tablet computers. Samsung claims this constitutes “prior art,” a concept of patent law in which the item in question is described or represented before the date of the patent.

If Samsung’s inventive approach to prior art is successful, it could open a giant can of patent-law worms. We can envision future authors and artists citing their work as prior art on designs for everything from personal jetpacks to flying cars, if anyone ever gets around to inventing those staples of science fiction.

2. A case of “Knowing” too much?
In 2006, a company called Global Findability patented a technique for using encoded information to improve geographical-coordinate mapping. In 2009, Global Findability filed a patent infringement suit against Summit Entertainment, the film studio responsible for the Nicolas Cage thriller “Knowing.”

In the film, Cage’s character discovers a 50-year-old encoded message that, according to the movie’s synopsis, “predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls, and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.”

Explaining exactly why this complaint was so ridiculous would spoil the movie, but let’s just say that unless Global Findability’s encoding method includes alien telepathy as a means of communication, there’s not a lot of basis for their claims.

It’s possible the company realized this as well; the case was dismissed in January of this year before coming to trial, for failure to serve.

3. A rather hairy case
A company called Celebrity Signatures was granted patents in 2010 for its “alternative hair” accessories, so when HairTech started selling its “Clipin-Go by Paris Hilton,” Celebrity Signatures filed a patent infringement claim to make HairTech stop selling its knock-offs of its, well, knock-off of Paris Hilton’s hair. Celebrity Signatures also alleges that HairTech is falsely claiming “patent pending” on its products.

Paris Hilton had signed an exclusive agreement HairTech’s product, which, sadly for Celebrity Signatures, meant they likely couldn’t produce Paris’s hair even if they had prevailed in their suit.

4. A Farking ridiculous claim
Earlier this year a company called “Gooseberry Natural Resources” sued a whole bunch of news aggregator websites, including Reddit, Fark, Digg, TechCrunch, and Yahoo, among others. The suit was based on an absurdly broad patent Gooseberry held covering the process of generating an online news release by inputting data into a web form which compiled the release and emailed it to media outlets.

One problem: most of the named sites don’t actually generate news releases. Gooseberry eventually gave up, although not before causing these sites and some smaller news-generating sites to spend a lot of time and money showing how ridiculous the claim was.

Perhaps the best rebuttal to Gooseberry’s claims came from Fark. When it became obvious the company couldn’t win their case, they tried to see how much they could get the various named companies to settle for. When Gooseberry asked Fark for their best offer, Drew Curtis, Fark admin and owner, laid it out: “I said how about you get nothing and drop the lawsuit? They accepted.”