A Canadian firm Wi-Lan, Inc. has decided to assert its patent rights by attacking a total of 22 separate companies, claiming patent infringement. The company holds 220 patents in all manner of wired and  wireless technology, including CDMA, DSL, DOCSIS, V-Chip, Wi-Fi, and WiMAX.

The lawsuits will be located in Marshall, Texas, which seems to be the IP infringement capital of the world. The Canadian firm is suing anyone and everyone, casting a wide net that includes Acer, Apple, Atheros Communications, Belkin, Best Buy, Buffalo Technology, Broadcom, Circuit City, Dell, D-Link, Gateway Inc, Hewlett-Packard, Infineon Technologies, Intel, Lenovo Group, Marvell Semiconductor, Netgear, Sony, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Westell Technologies, and 2wire, Inc.

from BetaNews on the subject

Chipmakers were included in the suits, the company said, only as a preventative measure.

“Say for argument’s sake we just sued the laptop guys in Texas, then it seems to be the strategy of the chip guys to then file a declaratory judgment action in California or wherever, and force us to litigate all over the place. So we wanted to prevent that, and force everyone into Texas.” Skippen remarked.

Though it sounds, with all the parties involved, like a massive undertaking, litigation appears to be a common step in Wi-LAN’s intellectual property licensing procedure. Written in the company’s “Licensing Program” on its Web site is the passage: “Like most lawsuits, well over 90% of patent litigation cases never proceed to trial because the parties agree to conclude a settlement agreement.”

Perhaps part of this 90%-plus settlement rate has to do with whom Wi-Lan focuses upon. “We want to bring maximum pressure upon the concerned parties to enter into settlements.” Skippen said.

and from another opinion blog

I have noticed over the last couple of days, stories cropping up over the technology news sites about Wi-LAN launching lawsuits against a number of companies selling consumer wireless networking products. Why is this something worth blogging about? It’s the subtle ways the stories are being written, then the way the typical respondents post their comments. It is… well… typical. It reinforces my belief that the masses of individuals, especially those who troll the technology web sites are utterly predictable and easily manipulated.
Manipulated you say?
Indeed. These stories talk about Wi-LAN as a technology Intellectual Property, or IP company. IP may be all that is left of Wi-LAN, I don’t know what their R&D efforts are these days, but it really doesn’t matter. At one time they used to be a player in the R&D of wireless networking equipment, then supplier of internet service provider (ISP) grade wireless access gear. Rural broadband comes to mind. They survived the dot com crash but are a skeleton of what they once were, now they are self described as a technology licensing company.
How is describing Wi-LAN as an IP firm manipulating? Simple. Let’s start with the Rambus case study.
Anybody familiar with Rambus knows that they ultimately failed in their quest to essentially own the IP surrounding the random access memory (RAM) market, and the masses of internet posters, myself included, rejoice. Rambus, used to be a member of a standards organization called JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council). Defendants allege that while Rambus was a member of JEDEC, they participated in the definition of future memory standards and technology, for which they either owned patents for, or were writing patents for. Several years later they demanded license fees from memory manufacturers. It was a long and bitter battle, eventually their quest ended in defeat by hand of the courts. For years Rambus was the height of evil in the eyes of community posting their comments to technology forums and web sites. That is the executive overview of how Rambus became a symbol of evil to an easily identified community, their other practices and strategies are not the topic of this article but also leave a bad taste.
Next let’s consider another company described in the technology news as an IP company. This company is named NTP. NTP claimed to own patents being used by a company called Research In Motion(RIM), the makers of Blackberry. I believe NTP really was an IP company by definition. Their only business ventures were conducted by legal staff. They owned five patents that were all ultimately rejected by the US patent office after they were contested, but they stood long enough to extract over 600 million USD from RIM. If you want to research a craziness of patent law, this is a great place to start. While this story was hot in the technology news market, just mention the word NTP in the same sentence as anything else, and you could manipulate the masses of comments and opinions to follow.
The last example I will identify is the case of SCO Unix. SCO was once a reputable flavor of Unix, but their popularity instantly disappeared when they launched a series of lawsuits against other companies who had their own version of Unix, as well as the open source community. Their argument, was that these other Unixes violated their rightful copyright and ownership of Unix. In the end, it is unknown whether or not there is any copyright violation, but what SCO claimed to own, the courts found that the real owner was Novell, and Novell has stated that they have no interest in pursuing this claim. Simply suing other Unixes for copyright infringement is no big deal in my opinion, but targeting the open source community and the masses of Linux users was what ultimately brought them into the company of Rambus and NTP. Grim smiles are now exposed by those who follow these stories in the technology news sites today, as SCOs failure has led them to bankruptcy.
Back to Wi-LAN, I have no idea whether Wi-LAN is making a legitimate claim for patent infringement, and it really doesn’t matter. Simply stating in the technology news stories that an IP company named Wi-LAN is suing companies for patent infringement puts them in the company of Rambus, NTP, and SCO. People who have never heard the name Wi-LAN instantly think of them as evil without knowing anything about them or their claim. Wi-LAN is guilty, their name is forever smeared in the opinion of those who follow technology new.  If they do not win this case, they are utterly doomed, no-one would dare do business with a company who has had their name and reputation destroyed.

 

So, as is usually true, the truth lies (no pun intended) somewhere in the middle of these two opinions.  The questions I ask, however, is why such a wide net? Surely BestBuy can’t be held responsible for patent infringement on products they sell - this alone makes the title I chose correct. If we start holding everyone in the sales chain responsible, the $50 wireless router will soon become the $250 wireless router, with less than $20 accounting for the technology, and the rest for investigative fees along the chain.

This is the sort of stupidity that makes people call the legal system broken, and doesn’t pass the common sense test, which should be a guide to pre-litigation decisions.

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Tags: litigation, common sense test, wi-lan, patent trolls, bestbuy,   cdma, dsl, docsis, v-chip, wi-fi, wimax, acer, apple, atheros communications, belkin, best buy, buffalo technology, broadcom, circuit city, dell, d-link, gateway inc, hewlett-packard, infineon technologies, intel, lenovo group, marvell semiconductor, netgear, sony, texas instruments, toshiba, westell technologies, 2wire inc