Patent trolling, meet RPost

Yesterday I mentioned Ubicomm and their patent trolling based on an ancient Xerox patent they acquired earlier this year. I think the mere fact that Xerox sold the patent says all we need to know about how applicable it is.
The other patent troll in the email space right now is RPost. Steve did a blog post about RPost patent trolling about a year ago.
This summer, RPost’s legal team started calling different companies in the email space. I got a call the first week in July. After introducing himself as their lawyer and reassuring me he was not sending me legal threats, he started to ask all sorts of questions about our technology. I declined to answer any of them.
The lawyer then said he had some paperwork to send me and asked for an email address. I told him we do not accept legal service by email and that he could send me any relevant paperwork to our address of record. If I had any questions about RPost having a real product, it was answered when the lawyer didn’t tell me that RPost technology is all about secure delivery of legal papers.
Others in the email space started reporting similar calls and letters from RPost around the same time.
It’s been 2 months (almost to the day) since RPost’s lawyer called me and we have yet to receive anything from them. Clients of mine, however, have received papers from RPost. The papers instruct recipients to read RPost’s patents and notify RPost if they are infringing.
Yes, RPost are such cheapskates they expect their target companies to do the work identifying any potential infringement. Or possibly it’s just that they have so little money they can’t afford to pay their legal team. Certainly my experience is that telling them to send us postal mail is enough expense? time? to stop them from moving forward.
My recommendations to anyone receiving a letter from RPost (or anyone else claiming patent infringement) are pretty simple.

  1. Talk to your legal team. This is what you pay them for and they’re going to give you the best advice. 
  2. Do not respond unless your legal team tells you to. RPost needs to do their own legal work and state a cause of action before anyone should take them seriously.
  3. Do not read the patents unless your legal team tells you to. RPost needs to do their own legal work and state an actual claim rather than relying on their targets to volunteer infringing activity.

And, well, that’s about it. Pass it up to your legal team and then forget about it.

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Patent trolling

I’ve recently become aware of activity from a couple patent trolls in the email space.
One is UbiCommLLC. They appear to be suing the Internet for violating a patent they acquired from Xerox. The lawsuit claim is that shopping cart abandonment emails violate a patent they own.
I did a little reading on this recently. UbiComm LLC formed itself in January of this year and acquired a Xerox patent the following month. They’ve since gone on an infringement spree, suing other printer companies, retailers, ESPs and that’s just what I can find in 2 minutes of searching.
The patent is U.S. Patent No. 5,603,054 titled “Method for Triggering Selected Machine Event When the Triggering Conditions of an Identified User Are Perceived.” I read a little of this patent and best I can tell (and I’m not a lawyer) this has zero to do with email and even less to do with shopping carts. Instead, this appears to be a way to identify where an individual is inside a local network and send a message to the machine closest to that person.
This is what I think the use case for the patent is. Take an office building, or even an office complex, or even an international corporation with hundreds of computers and printers and smart phones. Each one of those is connected to the network and is capable of displaying a message to a particular person. Each person in the building wears some sort of tag that is also hooked up to the network. I want to send a message to Bob, so I send a message to Bob. The local network figures out where Bob is, figures out what machine is closest to him and then presents that message to Bob on that machine.
This is conceptually different than email. The sending network doesn’t have to figure out where Bob is, it just sends the message to Bob’s email account. Bob chooses when and where to download the message. It’s not like shopping cart abandonment messages are targeted to my phone when I’m in the car, my office computer when I’m at work and my home computer when I’m at home.
In my non-legal opinion these are nuisance suits. The lawyers at Ratner Prestai seem to agree with me and give good suggestions on how to plan for such a thing.

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RPost and Goodmail settle lawsuit

Last September, I blogged about RPost suing Goodmail for patent infringement. Today the two companies announced they’ve reached a settlement and have forged a partnership. Goodmail will be offering RPost’s technology as an upgrade to customers and replacing their own “proof of delivery” technology with RPost’s legal service technology.

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Patenting whitelisting, then suing people who use it

Thanks to Ken for pointing this one out.
A number of companies, including Surewest, AT&T, Cisco and Comcast are being sued by a company called BuyerLeverage for violating a pair of patents because they’re using Return Path as part of their mail filtering decisions.
I pulled the docs (1-11-cv-00645-LPS).
The patents all seem to center around a system where there is another layer between sender and recipient. The sender and recipient negotiate a deposit before email is delivered.
The oldest patent was filed in October 2001 (Patent 7,072,943).

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