Paperless Patent Trolling

An unregistered entity known as Project Paperless LLC has been sending out lawsuits aplenty to average businesses, suing them for using everyday electronics such as scanners and fax machines and not paying licenses.  The lawsuits range from $900 - $1,200 dollars in value per employee using the devices.

Steven Vicinanza, the founder of BlueWave Computing, was a victim; if he were to pay the claims, he would owe a total of $130,000 dollars.

Steven Hill, the attorney at Project Paperless, claimed that they had a patent that covered the process of scanning and sending PDF documents.  All patents in question (numbers 6,185,590, 6,771,381, 7,477,410 and 7,986,426) are attributed to the inventor Laurence C. Klein.

Patent trolling is no small issue in the world of IT and communications.  People can file for patents or use legal loopholes to sue companies for using their technologies.  They attack both startup companies and extremely large tech giants.  It works because often their demands are petty enough that legal action would be more expensive than simply paying their settlement.

Project Paperless eventually split up into a variety of bogus six-letter companies that constantly changed names and credentials, including AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan.  The difficulty of tracking credentials of patent trolls is what makes it so hard to take legal action against them.

However, interestingly enough, the new companies did not file lawsuits.  In fact, they may simply be a scheme to intimidate small business owners to pay the settlement.

Ars Technica outlines one specific conversation with AllLed, one such company:

“Thank you for calling the legal department,” said a youngish-sounding man. “This is Kevin, how can I help you?”

I was calling about a letter I was holding from AllLed, I explained. Kevin asked for my letter’s “file number,” which was the one thing I couldn’t give him—it would have revealed the source from whom I had received the letter. I told Kevin I was a writer who had been given the letter by someone else. All I wanted to do was contact AllLed, LLC directly—so how could I do that?

“We don’t have any information on the entities that send the letter,” he said. It was just an answering service. “We don’t have their contact information.”

“Well, who are you the ‘legal department’ for?” I asked.

“Hmmm,” said Kevin. “Legal department.”

“I don’t get it—is ‘Legal Department’ a real company?” I persisted.

“Hmmm,” said Kevin again. “We’re just Legal Department.”

“Well, you work for someone, right? What company do you work for?”

“This is Legal Department. That’s all we can say.”

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/