Patent Law
Troll Tracker Outs Himself, $15K Reward Remains Unclaimed
Posted Feb 26, 2008, 07:23 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
The anonymous author of the Patent Troll Tracker blog has revealed that he is Richard Frenkel, an intellectual property lawyer who is a director in Cisco Systems' IP group.
Frenkel said he decided to out himself after he received an e-mail threat from someone who threatened to go public with his identity, the Recorder reports. Many patent lawyers told the legal publication they considered the blog to be required reading.
Chicago lawyer Raymond Niro had recently increased his reward offer to $15,000 to anyone who could provide him with the Troll Tracker’s identity. So far, no one has stepped forward to claim the reward. "Whoever did it did it not for the purposes of making money but rather for the purposes of exposing him," he told the Recorder.
Niro had offered the bounty because Troll Tracker had criticized his firm for representing "patent trolls," which own patents without making products. Frenkel said in a post revealing his identity that he started his blog because of the lack of information about trolls.
“When I started the blog, I did so mainly out of frustration,” Frankel wrote. “I was shocked to learn that a huge portion of the tech industry's patent disputes were with companies that were shells, with little cash and assets other than patents and a desire to litigate, and did not make and had never made any products. Yet when I would search the Internet for information about these putative licensors, I could find nothing.”
Frenkel is weighing whether to continue the blog. He said only his direct manager at Cisco, which holds more than 5,000 patents, knew of his anonymous blogging.
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Comments
Posted by Mark Pitchford - 4 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 18 hours, 48 minutes ago
I guess he wasn’t that disinterested observer that he would have had us all believe?
Still, his factual information on the entities backing shell corporations was interesting.
Posted by Joe - 4 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 16 hours, 10 minutes ago
Not a wise move on Mr. Frenkel’s part. I hope Mr. Frenkel has great E&O coverage—he’ll probably need it soon. That bounty wasn’t offered by some eccentric looking to sit down with him and buy him a cup of coffee. I would be shocked if Mr. Frenkel wasn’t soon named “defendant” by vindictive others looking to sue the $%^#! out of Frenkel. Too bad. A voice of truth—previously anonymous—will probably soon have effectively been silenced.
Posted by Wayne Isaacks - 4 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 15 hours, 46 minutes ago
As a business lawyer, I care about patents and their place in our buisness and social environment. While patents are a state constructed legally enforceable form of private property designed to assure protection of the profit opportunity as an incentive for the socially desirable benefit of invetnion, they are two-edged. Society is supposed to benefit from the invention. Anonymously holding and protecting of patents, with no products making the invention available to society, defets one side of the patent social equation, and seems to me inimical to sound public policy.
Let’s have transparency, and where patent holders may seek to keep the invention out of the market, to withholdt the benefit of the invention to society - I think it is a fair question whether that patent protection should continue.