The High Cost of Frivolous Lawsuits: Time to Deter the Patent Trolls?
By Karla Robinson
October 9, 2012
October 9, 2012
- Patent lawsuits are burying companies and technologists in expenses. In contrast, the cost for the patent trolls is relatively minimal — even if their case loses.
- In a GigaOM guest post, Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee writes, “meritless lawsuits cost us money in attorney fees, and force our engineers to spend time with lawyers rather than improving our product.”
- He talks about a recent patent litigation where a patent lawyer fought Twitter over a “patent issued by the Patent Office with a near-zero cost-of-invention.”
- “When you hear engineers complaining that the patent system is broken, a system that last year issued a record-breaking 247,000 new patents, this is the type of thing they are talking about,” Lee writes.
- “According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s 2011 survey, an average patent lawsuit costs between $900,000 to $6,000,000 to defend,” he continues. “In the last month and a half alone, Twitter has received three new patent troll lawsuits. The law currently does not allow us to recover the millions of dollars in fees we spent to defend ourselves — nor does it compensate us for the time spent by many Twitter employees who worked on the case. The law only allows us to ask for certain types of minor fees, which is why the court was only able to order this particular patent troll to pay us $10,447.85.”
- These costs do not include settlement fees. As Lee points out, Twitter has never agreed to settle a patent lawsuit.
- He concludes by advocating for Congressional bills like the SHIELD Act that aim to improve the current patent system by placing the financial responsibility for “trivial patent lawsuits” on the patent trolls.
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