Patent Litigation Weekly: Defendants Contest Scott Harris's 'Inventions'
By Alison Frankel
July 31, 2009
In last week's IP Law & Business column, Joe Mullin used the filing of two recent suits alleging infringement of patents developed by Scott Harris as the impetus for a highly entertaining Q&A with the former Fish & Richardson partner and self-proclaimed patent troll. Harris told Mullin (in addition to describing his newly invented foolproof toaster) that as an inventor, he believes strongly in the idea of intellectual property rights. "There are different kinds of property," Harris said. "There is the property you get when you make the product, and the kind you get when you are the first to come up with the idea, and you give that to the world."But what if Harris wasn't really the first to come up with the idea for the patents he obtained?
That's the allegation in Mullin's column this week. Rich Gresalfi, the Kenyon & Kenyon partner leading Sony's defense in one of the recently filed cases, tells Mullin that after Sony filed a quick motion for summary judgment, plaintiffs lawyers at Niro Scavone dropped the case. "The way they were reading the claims read directly on the prior art, in our view," Gresalfi said. His brief alleged that technology in use at a Barnes & Noble Web site predated Harris's electronic book display patent by three years. Gresalfi said that if the case hadn't been dismissed by the plaintiffs, Sony planned to accuse Harris of inequitable conduct for failing to disclose that prior art to the Patent and Trademark Office.
Niro Schiavone did not drop the infringement case against Oprah's Book Club, Sony's codefendant in the book display infringement case.
Mullin also spoke with the computer consultant who created a spam filter for a small California company that's one of six defendants in the other recent suit involving a Harris patent. He told Mullin that the allegedly infringed patent is worthless. "It's really kind of crazy," said Jack Bailey, a consultant in San Diego. "[Harris's patent] actually doesn't describe how the filter works. It just says that it filters spam by matching text...It doesn't say anything about how to do it. You couldn't build any sort of working program based on that patent."
A previous suit involving the Harris spam filter patent, which names Symantec as a defendant, has been kicking around since December. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges represents Symantec.
"If [Harris] wasn't hauling people into court, I'd be rolling on the ground laughing," the computer consultant told Mullin. "He snowed somebody into thinking it's a real invention."
