[crhulls]

Startups can pool together to fight these guys. My company, Life360 got sued after raising $50m. They thought this meant we had money to write checks from, but instead we decided to use it to fight.

We're basically being sued for allowing you to click a marker on a map initiating a phone call.

This obviously should never have been patented, so we are doing all the legal defense work and sharing it with the startup community.

See www.stopagis.com if you want to see how we really pissed off our troll.

And public shaming also works, the CEO of our troll didn't own his domain, so we bought it and drive traffic to the site whenever people search for his name (Malcolm Beyer www.malcolmbeyer.com). They don't like that we "aren't playing by the rules".

[teachingaway]

1. Love what Life360 is doing with the shared resources. Anti-patent troll caselaw has been AMAZING the last few months. I'll try to put together a good collection of the recent wins.

Anyone can reach out to me at @teachingaway if you want some law students to pitch in on a patent troll defense case. We don't have a huge capacity, but we can help a few startups with legal defense.

2. I'm getting FOUT on life360.com. Possibly caused by loading typekit fonts with tk.async="true"; ?

[octref]

Hello, I just made a blog post about this for my Networks class. If you are interested, here is the link

http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/09/23/to-slain-or-not...

[kissickas]

Not sure if it's intentionally "slain" or if you meant "slay" in most/all of those occurrences.

[darkarmani]

I'm sorry, but the US Army has been doing that since the late 90s. http://www.alu.army.mil/alog/issues/MayJun04/alog_revol_log....

They used satellite and VHF for communications. When I left they had very localized PCS phone networks and packet switched networks over radio. I find it very hard to believe there isn't prior art for all of this in the DoD.

[darkarmani]

HN posters can check out their list of patents or even better look up their pending patents and provide prior art to invalidate them before they are granted.

http://www.agisinc.com/Contact/Patents/Patents.html

The latest one seems like it could be invalidated by the "do it on a computer" rulings.

[xster]

Wonder if it's possible to sue the patent clerk that admitted the patent application in the first place. Keep the fight even further from the homeland.

[adventured]

Gotta suspect that would bring the US Government to the patent clerk's defense and end up being exactly what you don't want to have happen (pissing of the US Govt for no good reason, as they can be incredibly vindictive).

Further likelihood is that a judge would toss that lawsuit almost immediately.

[teachingaway]

>>... sue the patent clerk?

No, not really. The patent clerk made a mistake in approving the patent, buy they didn't intentionally grant a bad patent to cause trouble or make money. Its really the patent trolls that are at fault for weaponizing the patent clerk's mistake.

[mullingitover]

"I was just negligent, I didn't do it for personal gain" isn't enough to absolve you of responsibility in a civil suit. It's a shame that there's no accountability on the government's side when they screw up and cause harm, especially on this scale.

[scott_karana]

Wouldn't you have to prove that the patent clerk colluded with the applicant?

I don't think you would appreciate being sued for making a mistake at your job, would you? ;)

[notastartup]

It's really mind blowing how thick faced these patent trolls really are, making money off by literally a mafioso like shakedown.

Great job man. And what a great move, buying a name with his domain name. Keep the fight going.