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Electronic Frontier Foundation Busts Bad Patents


Not-for-profit law firm moves to beat more trolls

By Alex Handy
January 23, 2008 —  The Electronic Frontier Foundation has its own Ten Most Wanted. But unlike the FBI’s, this is a list of 10 bogus patents that the not-for-profit advocacy group hopes to have removed or re-examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

As 2008 begins, the firm has six targets left on its list of so-called patent abusers and four of the top 10 are under review. Of those four patents, the most recent was one held by Test.com. Patent number 6,513,042 is described as “a method for administering tests, lessons, assessments, and surveys on the Internet, scoring them, and maintaining records of test scores online.” It was approved for re-examination by the USPTO in 2006, and all 16 of Test.com’s claims have been rejected. Test.com’s response had not been filed with the USPTO by press time.

Using this patent, Test.com was bringing suit against colleges that offered online test taking. Emily Berger, a patent attorney on leave from a Cambridge, Mass., law firm to work with the EFF, said that the Test.com case was right in line with the EFF's criteria for a "bad" patent.

“In the Test.com case, they were going after universities. While I'm not saying universities can't always afford to defend themselves, there are situations where it's in the public interest to protect universities,” said Berger.

Other patents currently being re-examined at the EFF's behest include Ideaflood's patent on creating personalized sub-domains, and Neomedia Technologies' identifier/directory lookup patent. The EFF already succeeded in having a patent revoked that was held by Clear Channel and Live Nation, which codified a method of broadcasting concerts live on the Internet.

There's still work to be done, however. Next up for the EFF's scrutiny are patents related to VOIP, streaming media and natural language processing. Said Berger, “These were ones primarily where the patent owners had been looking to go after somebody who was a small business owner or an individual, who would not have been able to afford representation.”

That's where the EFF's status as a well-funded not-for-profit comes into play. The organization was originally founded in 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow. Since that time, the EFF has defended and prosecuted cases ranging from vulnerability disclosure to federal law enforcement raids of suspected hacker cliques.

So while there are still thousands of questionable patents out there—such as U.S. Patent 5,960,411, Amazon's one-click shopping patent—the EFF is concentrating its efforts and currency on patents that are currently being used to torment the less financially able.



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