Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Post # 6:Trolls
I was shocked to listen to the stories in class about the various Troll companies that attempt to gather money by threatening to sue companies that supposedly infringe upon their a series of patents. But the story below is truly ridiculous:
Steven Vicinanza, owner of IT services provider BlueWave Computing, recieved a letter that his company was required to pay $1,000 per employee for a license for a certain use of scanning quiptment. Put basically, the demand was that anyone using a office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay. In total, the troll called Project Paperless LLC was demanding $130,000.
Unbelievably, Project Paperless LLC claimed in the letter that if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document that was scanned in, they have a patent that covers that process.
Thankfully, Vicinanza won the consequential legal case, however thousands of these letters are still being sent out to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. Unfortunately, not all of these companies will have the strength to fight back.
Below is a copy of the letter for your interest:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/117291579/Led-Letter-final-redacted
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Nobody likes a troll and such a company in my opinion is questionably ethical, though, sadly, not at all illegal.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's just another example of people going into a business for the money rather than for the good of an ultimate goal.
I saw something very similar to this and wrote about it. There are many of these "trolls" who try to make companies allocate their resources to fighting these lawsuits when they should be utilizing the resources elsewhere. The patent this paperless company has is ridiculous. Everyone scans and everyone sends stuff through email. Glad they lose the case.
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