The patent trolling situation is getting beyond ridiculous. The bloody troll bullies from Innovatio are suing small owners of franchise hotels an coffee shops. In fact, their plan is suing everyone using Wi-Fi, although you’re not on their list, yet:
Innovatio has made a strategic and business judgment at this stage that it doesn’t intend to pursue [lawsuits on the basis of]residential use of WiFi.
Those are the words of a lawyer who goes by the name of Matthew G. McAndrews — you can see his shiny chubby face below — the lawyer at Niro, Haller & Niro who is representing Innovatio. Despite its name, Innovatio is not innovating anything. They just bought some patents and these lawyers — who happen to have their office right next to them — think they can make a $$$PROFIT$$$ out of it. According to this good fella, they just want their “client to get his due share”.
He says “this is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown”. They have already settled for amounts of $US2300 to $US5000 with some of these small businesses. And that’s exactly the trick: they sue for low amounts, so small that hiring a defendant lawyer would be a lot costlier. The small business can’t any other thing but pay when they receive the papers. I don’t know about you, but doesn’t that sound abusive?
At this stage, there’s only one course of action: every single computer company, from Intel to Microsoft to Apple, should sue these patent arseholes into the ground. Not only to get them out of circulation, but to put them in jail or good. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anonymous or LulzSec did something about it too. After all, these patent trolls’ ultimate objective is to milk everyone for as much as they can. [Patent Examiner]