‘Patent troll’ pays company it sued in ‘landmark’ case
The CEO of Russian cyber security company Kaspersky Lab has revealed a “landmark” victory against a “patent troll” after forcing it to pay him to end litigation that it had started.
In a blog post, Eugene Kaspersky published papers showing that lawyers for patent licensing company Wetro Lan agreed to pay $5,000 in compensation to end the litigation.
The settlement stemmed from a case last year when Wetro Lan sued Kaspersky Lab for patent infringement, claiming it had infringed US patent number 6,795,918, relating to firewall software.
Kaspersky claimed the lawsuit came with an offer to settle the case out of court, but he refused as the company “never give in to patent trolls”.
The patent in question expired in 2012 after the owner stopped paying the fees on it, before it was purchased by Wetro Lan.
Kaspersky claimed that Wetro Lan purchased the patent rights to sue IT companies for using the technology while the patent was valid.
He stated that rather than paying a small settlement to “shut them up”, he decided to face Wetro Lan in court.
Despite the company dropping its original demand from $60,000 to $10,000, Kaspersky refused, before Wetro Lan eventually offered him $5,000 to end the litigation.
He said the result will “go down in the annals of patent law as a crucial precedent, since no one before has ever secured a victory like we just have: we not only forced the troll to withdraw its lawsuit; we also got it to pay us compensation”.
He concluded: “And that was that. Another notch on our bridge, representing the number of victories against patent extortionists. The score now: 5:0. That’s not including the 23 out-of-court settlements (crucially: in which we paid zero dollars).”
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