EFF Claimed War on Patent Trolls

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently issued a statement, saying that it was leading a group of entities and law schools to start a new online resource called Trolling Effects. The idea is to crowdsource information, including demand letters, in order to help people fight patent trolls.


According to EFF activist Adi Kamdar, patent trolls should no longer manage to hide under a cloak of legal darkness. The new service is expected to shine a light on entities which abuse the patent system to shake down innovators. The problem is that patent trolls use the threat of expensive and lengthy patent litigation in order to extort settlements from innovators of any size. However, most of these threats never evolve into lawsuits, so most of the threatening letters never show up in public dockets.
The new service is going to provide transparency and allow recipients of demand letters to publish the documents on the Internet, find letters received by other victims, and find out who is really behind the threats. The website also offers comprehensive guides to the patent system as well as a blueprint for patent reform. The third parties, including journalists, academics, and policy makers, may also find the website a very useful resource for researching the patent system.
EFF confirms that there was a difference between a company which asserts their patents in attempt to protect a product and a company which does this solely to extort money via threats of litigation. There is always a chance that the claim you have received is fully legitimate, so Trolling Effects can come in handy – users will be able to search its database by sender or patent number in order to find out whether there have been any claims similar to theirs. At the moment, trolls tend to distribute their patents among a network of shell companies to make it hard to track who owns what.

No Google Glass behind the Wheel in Britain

Unsurprisingly, the UK Department of Transport revealed that it favors a ban on Google Glass behind the wheel. Its representative claimed that drivers need to give their full attention to the road, so they can’t behave in a way which may stop them from observing what is happening on the road.

The UK Department of Transport is aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and is currently in discussion with the police forces to make sure that people don’t use it while driving. The authority views Google Glass as something from the category of “careless or distracted driving”.

In the meantime, lawmakers across the pond are pondering the same problem. Nevertheless, since the United States cares about personal freedoms, banning normally doesn’t go down well with the public, particularly in parts of the country where you are able to purchase a confederate flag at any petrol station.

In response, Google told that it’s just “early days” for Google Glass and that there are careful thoughts about how to design the technology, because it keeps raising new issues. However, it is doubtful that looking at what’s in front of the car while driving can be regarded as a “new issue”.

Google used to say that Google Glass and driving isn’t a dangerous combination, because there are possibilities that developers could come up with applications that help drivers rather than distract them. For example, head-up displays have been in fighter jets for many years now and they are also offered as pricey options in some high-end cars. It’s only up to drivers how to use the technology – to get directions or tweet about the weather while driving.