The Daily Journal's Tuesday edition (not linkable) reports that Troll Tracker author Rick Frenkel, and his employer Cisco, have been sued for defamation by two East Texas attorneys who are players in that district's patent litigation scene, Eric Albritton and T. John Ward, Jr.

Dave Garrod, a lawyer who leads patent reform group PubPat's initiative against false marking, is now playing the part of the patent troll. He filed a patent infringement lawsuit against a number of tech companies, including a small Texas software company that went out of business years ago.

The Free Software Foundation and Cisco have now settled the litigation over the GPL and Cisco's subsidiary, Linksys.

"Ballad of the Patent Troll" - video criticising the likes of Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's patent troll

So now that it’s happened, let me introduce myself. My name is Rick Frenkel. I started in IP over 10 years ago, as a law clerk at Lyon & Lyon in Los Angeles. After a few years there as a law clerk and attorney, I litigated patent cases for several years at Irell & Manella. Two years ago I moved to the Valley and went in-house at Cisco. In my career, I have represented plaintiffs, defendants, large companies, small companies, individual inventors, universities, and everything in between. I currently work at Cisco.

Who doesn't like patent litigation? I know I do. What could be more fun than reading newspapers articles about companies suing the pants out of each other for infringing on ideas the suing party are theirs. It doesn't matter that the defendant might never even have heard of the patent in question, as patent law nevertheless applies and gives the claimant a chance to make a windfall in damages for patent infringement.

The two companies in red defended themselves against a Microsoft-associated patent troll, but details about the trial remain limited even after its conclusion; no statement from Novell yet

Every company is in the software business, which means that every company has software liability. We estimate $11.4 billion a year is spent on software patent litigation (see our resources for economists page), and not just by Microsoft and IBM—The Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor are facing software patent infringement lawsuits for their use of the standard software necessary for running a modern business.

There's news from the NetApp-Sun patent litigation front, and I think you'll like it. Sun's general counsel, Mike Dillon, posts the news that the US Patent Office has now responded to all six of Sun's reexamination requests, which they filed based on prior art.