Score one for the trolls
by: Henry Meier
The Supreme Court feels your pain when it comes to those increasingly ubiquitous demand letters sent to your credit union by Patent Trolls out to shakedown your credit union for using technology which allegedly violates an obscure paten but there is not much it can do about it. That’s the takeaway from a case decided yesterday by the Supreme Court. The Court is clearly frustrated with the state of patent law. Hopefully Congress shares its frustration.
Let’s say you buy a cutting edge ATM. If a patent holder feels that the ATM maker is using technology for which they have a patent your ATM maker could be sued not only for using the patented technology without permission but also for inducing third party’s-like your credit union-to violate the patent by buying the ATM.
The Issue debated in Commil USA, LLC v. Cisco Sys., Inc., No. 13-896, 2015 WL 2456617, (U.S. May 26, 2015)( http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-896_l53m.pdf) was whether a company could defend itself against inducement claims by proving that it had a good faith belief that it was not violating a patent. The Court said no. This means that, so long as my fictitious ATM maker was using technology that violated a patent, it violated the law by inducing your credit union to buy its ATM regardless of how earnestly it believed it was doing nothing wrong.
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