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.
These low life’s even make ambulance chasers look good. What losers
A “Voluntary Dismissal” on the docket often indicates a settlement.
We need to adopt the English system, so that losing plaintiffs pay defendants costs. Many, if not all, of these frivolous suits would disappear overnight
”’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.” Amongst the features needed in patent reform is not to give patents to ideas that are intuitive and probably considered by people at happy hour now. Nothing patentable IMHO there.
@This comes to mind – there is a lot of controversy in the IP space about so-called “process patents”. There are many which are simply description of a process (often widely used but not directly copied since often intuitive) then you have scum like this trying to sue. There are numerous examples (like the mouse on a screen, placement of icons on a computer home page, etc). They almost always get thrown out or quickly settled for a very small amount (to avoid paying attorneys to win the case which is often what would happen). Unfortunately, you have low lifes attorneys that know they will get some settlement to make it go away and continue to press these cases. I agree making the losing party pay (often you can’t even sue them for damages after a case is thrown out) is the only way to make it not worth their time.
@This comes to mind: Patents should not be given for ideas for processes that have not been actually developed. I can think of 1000 things we could do, but I have neither the time nor capability to actually develop them. USPO is allowing patents to be issued for dreams, not products or processes. Imagine if someone had obtained a patent for “a device using electricity to produce artificial light” but had never actually designed or developed a light bulb, nor explained the process by which light would be produced and then sued the hell out of Edison. Yet, that is exactly what is happening today.
@ Gary — This is our patent system working as intended.
This comes to mind has a good point. This is similar to patenting the wheel.
Vexatious litigant? Can we troll the troll?
Seven years before Edison’s birth, Warren de la Rue developed a light bulb with a platinum filament. It worked, but was too expensive. Somebody later patented a light bulb describing the filaments as most anything vegetable, animal, or mineral. The patent-holder had no success in finding a filament that was practical in light output and life. When Edison found, after a massive amount of testing, a filament that had the right qualities, he obtained a patent on his carbon-filament bulb. Lawsuit followed. Edison won at SCOTUS. The court, correctly for my tastes, ruled that a concept of a light bulb isn’t enough if you can make a working product. We need more of that thinking.
@Gary: The whole concept of a “patent troll” as a pejorative description of a patent owner was created by major patent infringers, mainly large tech. companies, as part of the PR used against inventors who they want to rob. A patent “troll” is just the owner of something. Per Coase, you can negotiate to assign use rights.
Consider your car. If neither you or your wife are using it can I just take it to use? Or do I have to negotiate for an agreement wwith you to use it.
The analogy is exact and you are the unwitting supplecant of the stealing class (again, mainly large, non-inventing, tech. companies) if you support this nonsense.
@bhn: What frivolous suits? What troll? This is theft.
@bhn: They are more likely to sue Edison for the credit he stole from Tesla.
@L3 – a physical car is not even close to analagous, first intellectual and physical property are fundamentally different (see, for instance https://www.eff.org/pages/selling-wine-without-bottles-economy-mind-global-net) and second because there’s a difference between genuine invention and tolling innovation with generic and barely-related broad legal descriptions.
“tolling innovation with generic and barely-related broad legal descriptions.”
Not sure hat you mean here. If you mean that something was granted a patent that it was not entitled to, that was done by the patent office. The holder is not to blame.
The analogy is exact. There is nothing about the difference in the objects that is relevant to the point: Someone else owns something and you are stealing it.