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Process Patent

azgreg

azgreg

Chicks dig the long ball
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Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners

Patent trolls want $1,000

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he'd paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

The letters, he soon found out, were indeed real and quite serious—he wasn't the only person getting them. BlueWave works mostly with small and mid-sized businesses in the Atlanta area, and before long, several of his own customers were contacting him about letters they had received from the same mysterious entity: "Project Paperless LLC."

"I was just mad," he said.

Vicinanza soon got in touch with the attorney representing Project Paperless: Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm.

"[Hill] was very cordial and very nice," he told Ars. "He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process."
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I havn't seen everything, but I'm getting closer.

This is crazy.
 
They are taking the Apple approach to business.
 
0bserver92 said:
They are taking the Apple approach to business.
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It is more like the porn industry. I read somewhere some of them were putting their vids into the file sharing stream and then tracking the IP of those who access it and who accesses from them and trying to force the folks they can track down to pay up or be sued for the statutory damage of $150K per violation. I heard some of the Courts have been denying broad subpoenas for blocks of IP's to force them to apply for each IP just to drive up the cost of them doing this so they will stop their John Doe Lawsuits and some have apparently stopped allowing Defendants John Doe 1-2,500 saying they have to prove they are all like kind offenders to maintain mass claims. in a single suit.
 
Fisher said:
It is more like the porn industry. I read somewhere some of them were putting their vids into the file sharing stream and then tracking the IP of those who access it and who accesses from them and trying to force the folks they can track down to pay up or be sued for the statutory damage of $150K per violation. I heard some of the Courts have been denying broad subpoenas for blocks of IP's to force them to apply for each IP just to drive up the cost of them doing this so they will stop their John Doe Lawsuits and some have apparently stopped allowing Defendants John Doe 1-2,500 saying they have to prove they are all like kind offenders to maintain mass claims. in a single suit.
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Yea, if they freely upload their own videos, that should be enough evidence to disallow any monetary damages.
They gave it away themselves.
 
Harry Guerrilla said:
Yea, if they freely upload their own videos, that should be enough evidence to disallow any monetary damages.
They gave it away themselves.
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I don't disagree. I read one gay porn company claimed to be hiring an ad service to ID the IP users, but said if you voluntarily fessed up and paid before they found you, they would let you slide. It was apparently not very well received in that community for fear teens and tweens would be outed so they backed off some and said they would just go after mass offenders, not infrequent downloaders of their content after a big backlash by people who did subscribe to their sites. I have not checked, but it used to technically by federal statute to be illegal to transmit porn over the internet so that might would have been another defense.
 
ChuckBerry said:
a fascinating read thanks for the link
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I agree. I am going to be passing that one around to business contacts to let them know to Just Say No!!! if they get hit up.
 
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