Rackspace goes after 'most notorious patent troll in America'

[Shawn Knight]

IT hosting company Rackspace is going after what they describe as the most notorious patent troll in America. The company filed a lawsuit against Parallel Iron and IP Nav, patent assertion entities (PAE) that make money by licensing patents to customers rather than crafting their own goods based on the patents they own.

The legal move comes after Parallel Iron sued Rackspace and 11 other companies last week. The firm claimed that the defendants infringed on three patents covering the use of the open-source Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). Parallel Iron has sued at least 23 others over this same patent since June 2012 including Amazon, Facebook and Oracle, just to name a few.

Rackspace first ran into legal issues with IP Nav back in 2010 when they accused the hosting company of patent infringement but wouldn’t tell them what specifically it was about until Rackspace agreed to sign a forbearance agreement. This agreement said that either side would give the other a full 30 days notice before perusing any legal action. The hosting company said they signed the agreement but the patent troll broke the agreement and sued without giving prior warning.

The latest lawsuit was filed in the US District Court in San Antonio and cites breach of contract and a declaratory judgment saying Rackspace does not infringe on the three patents in question. For what it’s worth, Rackspace was recently granted a dismissal of a lawsuit by Uniloc that claimed they infringed on a patent related to processing floating-point numbers.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/52158-rackspace-goes-after-most-notorious-patent-troll-in-america.html

 

[psycros]

Remember when unrealized patents couldn't hold an industry hostage? Pepperidge Farms remembers!

 

[VitalyT]

A communistic precept comes to mind, after reading such articles - "Shoot all the lawyers!"

 

[Tygerstrike]

I sense a lot of bridges will be safer to cross as the trolls are now out warring with each other. QUICK!! Get your goats across!! Before Apple takes up residence!!

 

[Guest]

I think that these patent trolls need to be outed. They're not afraid of anything. They sue where they can, and collect what they can, but if they face any sort of opposition they tuck their tails between their legs and run.

So what needs to happen, is any time any website or company is under threat, they need to make it as public as possible. Let the power of the internet handle these scum bags. Every time something like this happens, release the full names of the lawyers involved and their company addresses.

At that point, let the internet trolls loose. I don't know about you guys, but I've seen the power of trolls on the internet. It wouldn't take very many instances of law firms being hacked, identities stolen, DDOS attacks, etc., before the patent trolls were too scared to keep doing what they're doing.

These people truly are scum, they should be exposed. No one truly likes having the spotlight on them. And in the end, it'd be pretty entertaining for us to sit back and watch.

 

[Guest]

@ previous poster, if we shoot all the lawyers who will defend us from Obama? as well as other patent trolls?


@the poster right behind me, are you suggesting we have troll wars? troll fighting troll?