Patent Troll Suing FTC, Claims Constitutional Right to Threaten Lawsuits Over Alleged Patent Infringement

There’s a certain way to scan
documents and e-mail them that MPHJ Technology Investments
says it holds a government-awarded patent for. The company, a
so-called “patent assertion entity” or troll, is accused of
threatening to sue companies for infringement if they don’t pay a
thousand dollars per worker, according to
Legal Newsline, which reports that MPHJ is now suing the FTC to
stop the FTC from suing it for “unfair trade practices,” or
threatening to sue patent infringers without actually intending to.
Outside of the lawsuit, MPHJ claims free speech protections, too.
Via Legal Newsline:

In a corporate statement last week, MPHJ said it
believes the FTC has decided it simply does not like the free
speech in which the company is engaged and is seeking to interfere
with or stop that speech.

“The FTC does not contest that MPHJ’s patents are valid, that they
may be are infringed by thousands of businesses, that MPHJ has the
right to enforce its patents against those infringers, that MPHJ
has a right to send letters in doing so, and does not contest that
MPHJ has the right to threaten suit for infringement,” the company
said in its statement.

Legal Newsline notes a
September ruling by a federal judge that the attempt by the
Nebraska attorney general to stop MPHJ’s law firm from sending
cease and desist orders was a violation of the First Amendment, and
patent law.

Indeed, while the “patent troll” MPHJ exists only to buy patents
and then target perceived patent infringers, companies that hold
patents to mundane-sounding processes like scanning documents for
e-mail but actually also make things, in part using those patents,
sometimes engage in trollish behavior as well.

Apple and Samsung have been engaged in a protracted legal war
over smartphone technology patents
for several years, with Apple also
claiming Samsung’s phones and tablets copied Apple’s look and
feel. The patents include processes like how to pinch your screen
to zoom, again, mundane-sounding in 2014.

Patent laws, originally, were meant to “promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts,” as the Constitution describes them in one
of the actually enumerated powers of Congress. Yet when fights like
Apple and Samsung’s lead to dueling orders to prevent certain
products from entering certain markets, it retards technological
progress, as contrary to the stated aims of laws protecting
copyrights and patents as a company that goes around threatening to
sue office workers for the way they e-mail documents, because the
government granted it a piece of paper granting it rights to that
process.

The Supreme Court will be hearing a case on software patents
specifically, where Ronald  Bailey argues the court could
strike a blow for innovation by killing
off the software patent.