Last week we had the bizarre story of how a bigshot patent attorney, Raymond Niro, was so disturbed by the anonymous
Patent Troll Tracker shining some light on Niro and some of Niro's clients, that he was
offering a $5000 bounty to anyone who could identify the Tracker. Niro has now responded to some of the stories about the bounty, where he tries to
"correct a few misconceptions" about the story. On one point, he is quite accurate -- the patent he's been accusing the Troll Tracker of accusing is not owned by Acacia, but by another firm, Global Patent Holdings. Of course, the Tracker had already
corrected that story a few days ago, so Niro wasn't actually adding anything there. Also, Niro states that Global Patent Holdings "has no connection to Acacia" which is a bit misleading. It may not currently have any connection, but three years ago Acacia bought most of Global Patent Holdings' assets -- and it was even misreported by the NY Times that Acacia had
bought the entire company. So, it was a pretty easy mistake to make -- especially since these patent hoarding firms use so many
shell companies to hide their identities.
More importantly, Niro first raises the bounty to $10,000 for information identifying the Tracker, and then states that the Tracker needs to be exposed to be "held accountable for what he says." He also notes "if you really have anything truthful to say, you are not afraid of identifying yourself." You would think that Niro, as an intellectual property lawyer, would be well aware of both the historical importance of anonymity and the US courts
repeated decisions pointing out that anonymity is part of our free speech rights. As for not "being afraid" to identify yourself, would Niro have said the same thing of the authors of
The Federalist Papers? There's often a good reason to be anonymous -- which is why the courts protect it as free speech. Niro also insists that he's not trying to identify the Tracker in order to sue over the patent in question, but that would be much more believable if Niro hadn't used that same patent against
another critic and also sent the Tracker an email telling him that
he was infringing on that patent. As for the patent itself, Niro makes it clear that: "Anyone that operates a website runs the risk of infringing Global's patent if (as we believe) that patent covers the manner in which JPEG images are displayed on a website." There are some people who can make reasonable claims that they're trying to use the patent system to further the cause of innovation. But when someone claims that he can sue any website that has a JPEG image in it, you have to wonder how that could possibly "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
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