Troll Tracker has been unmasked as a patent lawyer for Cisco. Now they're both facing litigation.

"We owns the internet!", claim ultimate patent trolls, Eolas, in the East District Court of Texas. Where else?

Apple stifles iPod/iTunes interoperability with GNU/Linux, gets sued over patents, gets advertisements banned for deception

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.

If you're getting sued for patent infringement, you have a right to know who is really behind the lawsuit, and so does the public. So I started digging up publicly available information. What I found amazed me - so many patent plaintiffs, especially in the Eastern District of Texas, make no products, and just try to extract money out of their IP.

When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia’s patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat’s next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way?

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.

A massive patent lawsuit hits Microsoft, Novell and many others

If you followed my recent video tutorial on enabling Ubuntu/GNOME's Tracker search tool, you should now be enjoying the ability to search the files on your system. During a recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, which was recently released, I found that the Tracker search tool index had become corrupted. I tried to tell Tracker to rebuild the index, but experienced some weird issues.