Patent Troll Targets Airline Call Center Software In New Suit — 90+ Filings In 3 Years

Patent Armory Inc. has to be my favorite name for a lawsuit plaintiff ever. They’re basically announcing themselves as patent trolls. They sued Dallas-based air carrier JSX on Thursday, accusing the public charter operator of infringing two patents for the way its customer service routes calls., covering the idea of using software to match demand and supposedly optimizes outcome.

• Patent No. 7,023,979 “Telephony control system with intelligent call routing” for classifying incoming calls, comparing them to call center agent characteristics, and selecting an optimal agent to route the call to.
• Patent No. 9,456,086 “Method and system for matching entities in an auction” for automating matching based on things like economic surplus and opportunity cost.

That first patent actually expired on November 13, 2023, so they can only sue for past infringement and there’s no compounding damages for future infringement. The second patent will be active through August 26, 2027.

Patent Armory has appeared to sue more than 90 times since acquiring the patents three years ago. They sued Delta a year and a half ago, and that suit lasted only about three months before being voluntarily dismissed.

The lawsuit claims JSX infringed the patents through its call center routing, and continued to do so after receiving notice of the infringment (and therefore the infringement was willful). But it doesn’t appear to really explain what JSX actually does and how it maps onto JSX’s call center activity for. In other words, there doesn’t seem to have been much pre-suit discovery to identify if there’s actually infringing activity, or a clean explanation of the exact product or vendor being used and how that infringes.

Hertz successfully attacked a similar suit as just an abstract notion of “evaluating communications data to make a routing decision”. One analysis concluded that,

Patent Armory has proceeded in a file-and-settle fashion, with a majority of complaints having been dismissed at the early pleading stages.

A classic patent troll is suing American Airlines and Southwest over their free wifi setup. Another patent troll successfully sued TSA for sending trays through its checkpoints and using carts to move the trays back and forth from one end of the checkpoint to another.