Id love to understand how a french government sovereign investment fund ends up involved in this.
Was the the patent troll (or really, its lawyers) vendor explicitly shopped because of a reputation for playing dirty ?
or if is a case of really, really bad incentives, where the idea was legit...but a rogue actor just took it in an unexpected direction ?
I hope the investigation can go upstream and get this information
My initial assumption is that they acquire some IP in bulk, monetized what they could in better ways and then were left with a couple D rate pieces that they happily loaned out to anyone willing to make a buck with them on the condition they get a cut. It just so happened that "anyone" was a less than upstanding party.
The french fund got some assets that they didn't know what to do with, so they just loaned it out to the highest bidder.
Just capitalism being capitalism. But that is how investment funds work - they don't usually directly manage things but give it to other people to manage.
Nice, it's this kind of involvement in more obscure technical, but very real issues that make me an EFF member.
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It does seem very odd that "someone" can just claim ownership, file a lawsuit, and someone else has to defend themself in the face of a masked accuser whose motives, funding ... and even their own claimed ownership is so obscure that you can't effectively question it.
Good for the judge here for being curious and recognizing this conundrum.
That fact pattern is absolutely not normal. That's why this raised so many eyebrows and actually got looked into.
Edit: Lawsuits invariably establish "who" the plaintiff is and their relationship to the defendant because this is almost always a byproduct of determining that they have and the extent to which they've been (allegedly) wronged by the defendant's actions.
The plaintiffs here flew too close to the su. I guess they got cocky after all those years of "legit" patent trolling, lol.
If they were legit, then I don't see the need to assign the patents they own to someone else before litigating. Unless there's a gotcha, and it's a scam somehow.
Very strange, and just another reason why patents should probably be non-transferrable and "use it or lose it".
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/judges-litigation-fundi...
> Connolly ultimately concluded that the arrangements were unfair to the LLC owners and that Pugal, Bui, and Hall should’ve had independent counsel advising them. He wrote that IP Edge structured the LLCs so that it received the lion’s share of the litigation benefits while the the on-paper owners “assume all the risk” from the lawsuits, including attorneys’ fees awards or court-imposed sanctions.
However a legal firm is not supposed to do that, which is why they are in trouble.
This calls for a round of applause :)
Hopefully they will all achieve the most widespread recognition for every bit of the work they have done over the years.
This case doesn't really solve any of those.