The Prior Art

Patent Litigation Weekly: Inventor from ESN v. Cisco and Troll Tracker Lawsuits Arrested on Weapons Charges

The inventor who holds the patent that was at the heart of two libel lawsuits against "Patent Troll Tracker" blogger Rick Frenkel and Cisco Systems was arrested last week, after police found an illegal stockpile of firearms, ammunition, and grenades in his home in Manchester, Massachusetts, about 30 miles from Boston. Gregory Girard, named inventor on U.S. Patent No. 7,283,519, believed he was readying himself for "Armageddon," according to police. In addition to having around 20 firearms, Girard was stockpiling food and medicine, camouflage, and body armor, and had built an indoor shooting range in the attic of his condominium, according to accounts of the arrest in the Gloucester Daily Times and the Boston Globe. Girard had a license for the guns, but his explosives, double-edged knives, and habit of shooting indoors are all illegal.

Last Wednesday, a Massachusetts superior court judge deemed Girard too dangerous to be released and ordered him held until his probable cause hearing on March 15. According to police reports, Girard recently told his wife: "It's fine to shoot people in the head because traitors deserve it," and "Don't talk to people, shoot them instead." (His wife reported concerns about his increasingly paranoid behavior to authorities the day before he was arrested.) For Girard, those "traitors" may have included most members of Congress; news blog TPM Muckraker notes that Girard has been an active poster in far-right Internet forums for the past month.

In 2007, Girard's patent was the basis of an infringement suit that his holding company, ESN, filed against Cisco Systems. For ESN, it was a hugely important suit; one of ESN's lawyers later testified that his client was seeking "potentially hundreds of millions of dollars" from an East Texas patent win against Cisco.

Gregory Bender Fires Off More Patent Lawsuits in N. D. California

The Gregory Bender barrage of patent lawsuits continues to grow in the Northern District of California. I reported in last week's Patent Lit Weekly that Bender had filed against 19 companies over a one-week period; he now has added nine more companies to the list, in three lawsuits.

All the suits are against high-tech firms and involve Bender's 5,103,188 patent, issued in 1992. The newest defendants are:

• AT&T
  
• AT&T Mobility
  
• Sony-Ericsson Mobile
  
• Panasonic
  
• Samsung Semiconductor  
• Toshiba America
  
• Hitachi America
  
• Seagate Technologies
  
• Western Digital
  

That brings the total to 28 companies sued in 22 lawsuits. In terms of number of defendants sued over a single patent at one time, Bender's '188 patent surely is pushing some kind of record. And there may be more. "I think there certainly are additional potential infringers out there," says Bender's lawyer, David Kuhn.