Ward Jr. may have pursued Troll Tracker for months

Following up on the recent demise of the popular and controversial Troll Tracker blog: I've read T. John Ward, Jr.'s defamation complaint (link) against Patent Troll Tracker, thanks to Patently-O and the Zura 271 blog. Readers should note that it's an amended complaint. According to the case docket in Gregg County District Court (link), the case was originally filed as John Ward, Jr. v. John Doe et al. on Nov. 7, 2007, as a petition to depose someone at Google. I'm guessing that the goal was to discover Troll Tracker's identity. (Google hosted the anonymous blog.) Since then:

Jan. 24: Petition to depose granted.

Feb. 23: Troll Tracker reveals himself as Rick Frenkel, an IP director at Cisco Systems.

Feb. 27: Ward Jr. filed an amended complaint claiming defamation against Cisco and Frenkel.

March 3: Eric Albritton files a separate complaint against Cisco and Frenkel. I have not seen this one. (link to docket)

The two posts Ward objects to are dated Oct. 17 and Oct. 18 of last year; those posts are printed out and attached to the end of his complaint. If those printouts are accurate, Frenkel edited the language of his Oct. 18 post at some point, and acknowledged doing so; the language in the Ward Jr. complaint differs from my version, which I saved on Feb. 25, 2008.

The first two paragraphs of the Oct. 18 are the same in both the complaint and my copy:

I got a couple of anonymous emails this morning, pointing out that the docket in ESN v. Cisco (the Texas docket, not the Connecticut docket), had been altered. One email suggested that ESN’s local counsel called the EDTX court clerk, and convinced him/her to change the docket to reflect an October 16 filing date, rather than the October 15 filing date. I checked, and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened – the docket was altered to reflect an October 16 filing date and the complaint was altered to change the filing date stamp from October 15 to October 16. Only the EDTX Court Clerk could have made such changes.

Of course, there are a couple of flaws in this conspiracy. First, ESN counsel Eric Albritton signed the Civil Cover Sheet stating that the complaint had been filed on October 15. Second, there’s tons of proof that ESN filed on October 15. Heck, Dennis Crouch may be subpoenaed as a witness!

Here's the end of the Oct. 18 post per the Ward complaint (emphasis mine):

You can’t change history, and it’s outrageous that the Eastern District of Texas may have, wittingly or unwittingly, helped a non-practicing entity to try to manufacture subject matter jurisdiction. This is yet another example of the abusive nature of litigating patent cases in the Banana Republic of East Texas.

(n.b.: don’t be surprised if the docket changes back once the higher-ups in the Court get wind of this, making this post completely irrelevant).

And here's the end of my version (emphases mine):

You can’t change history, and it’s outrageous that the Eastern District of Texas may have, wittingly or unwittingly, helped a non-practicing entity to try to manufacture subject matter jurisdiction. Even if this was a "mistake," which I can't see how it could be, given that someone emailed me a printout of the docket from Monday showing the case, the proper course of action should be a motion to correct the docket.

(n.b.: don’t be surprised if the docket changes back once the higher-ups in the Court get wind of this, making this post completely irrelevant).

EDIT: You can't change history, but you can change a blog entry based on information emailed to you from a helpful reader.

So it looks like he got some more evidence and scaled down the tone a notch. Either way, it hardly sounds defamatory to me.

For the Oct. 17 Troll Tracker post, the version in the lawsuit matches my version exactly. You can read the relevant parts of that in my earlier post about Troll Tracker's demise, and Cisco's response.

Patently-O has links to other coverage, and the clearest description of the events at issue in the Ward v. Frenkel lawsuit, which involves the filing date of the ESN v. Cisco lawsuit. (link) If this is defamation... I don't even know where to begin. Ward files patent infringement lawsuits one minute after the stroke of midnight, and then sues when people think he filed a day too early? Obviously, this could have been cleared up without a lawsuit, but Ward Jr. hasn't been too communicative (he's never returned my calls, including one yesterday afternoon). The original complaint really was time-stamped 10/15, as noted on Patently-O, which would mean Ward's patent gun was shooting blanks.

Comments

[real anonymous]

My guess is the "helpful reader" may have later sued him. :-)

[Doug van Aman]

Can someone please explain: Where’s the defamation? What damage do the plaintiffs specifically claim? Nothing in the snippets that I’ve read on this case appears to be anything close to defamation.

Instead, it appears to be just another harassment lawsuit – one of those where some greedy little grunt casts a line to see if he can force a settlement over litigation.

It’s that same wrong-minded thinking in Gibson’s lawsuit over Activision (and now expanded to include Walmart, Target, Amazon, GameStop, K-Mart, and Toys R Us).

This stupidity makes me yearn (hope upon hope) for some legislative or regulatory leadership to put an end to these shenanigans because that giant sucking sound is the effect this abominable lawsuits on U.S. innovation.

And no, I'm not an employee, spouse, friend, business partner, etc. of any of the named defendants.