Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> Patent Troll Tracker

Patent Law

: Patent Troll Tracker

J. Carl Cooper and Technology Licensing Corporation

By Troll Tracker

What's a troll tracker to do? I have poor J. Carl Cooper's biography already written, but there are so many other tempting stories. First, there's this drivel, on how patent reform will ruin society and lead to the crash of our economy, etc. I'll respond in a couple of weeks - closer to the actual debate in the Senate. It sure got the cheering section going, though. Second, there are 37-defendant cases being filed in Texas left and right. Minerva on Tuesday; Source, Inc. yesterday. So I'll add that one to the list. Third, I'm getting a ton of email from people suggesting this story or that story - good leads, most of them. So I now have a backlog of ideas to last me a while.

Without further adieu, on to J-Carl. I previously posted this feature on a case Technology Licensing Corporation and IP Innovation, LLC filed in the Eastern District of Texas against Red Hat and Novell. At the time, I concluded, correctly, that Technology Licensing Corporation was a shell corporation for the inventor, J. Carl Cooper. I didn't really explore too much, though.

Now I have. In numerous court filings, Technology Licensing Corp. (not to be confused with the totally separate California patent licensing shop, Technology Licensing Company -- more on them another day) admits it is a shell for J. Carl Cooper. TLC first started working with TechSearch back in the day, and now Acacia since the big Acacia-TechSearch transaction.

Who is J. Carl Cooper, anyway? For one, he is a registered patent agent. He also sometimes testifies as an expert in patent litigation. He used to be affiliated with the Los Gatos, California company Pixel Instruments Corp., but now has moved to the Lake Tahoe area. Similarly, Technology Licensing, once located at the home offices of Pixel in Los Gatos, has moved to Carson City, Nevada.

This article on Ray Niro (titled, by someone else, "Meet the Original Patent Troll") states that Cooper came to Niro through an introduction made by Anthony O. Brown of TechSearch. The article claims that Niro has netted over $50 million for Cooper.

According to this cached page from 3 years ago, Cooper was on the Board of Directors of TechSearch before it was vastly sold to Acacia. He had over 43 patents as of that time. Cooper's company submitted an amicus brief in the eBay case re injunctions. His attorneys explained that Cooper could not compete against foreign copyists, "and thus turned to licensing and patent enforcement instead of manufacturing." Cooper recently told the Wall Street Journal that the Supreme Court's decisions have made his enforcement program harder, due to the difficulty of getting injunctions.

Technology Licensing Corp. also has a website. On it, they explain that the amount of money they have made is actually $100 million. We also learn that they have a licensing manager in Pebble Beach, California - Warren E. Small. And now they have over 60 patents.

The reason the number jumped from 43 to 60 is that TLC is now not only licensing its own home-grown patents, but is in the business of buying patents of others and suing on those patents to make money. Given the number of lawsuits, the amount of money he has made, and this recent patent-buying-for-the-purpose-of-assertion binge, I'm hard-pressed to call J. Carl Cooper the typical "small inventor." The most recent case that got a ton of press was the case where Acacia and TLC went halvsies on patents from Xerox, and then sued Red Hat and Novell (after quickly getting a settlement from Apple), and then, Google.

So let's look at the litigation filed by Cooper and TLC. He started out on his own in 1997, suing Toshiba and Circuit City. In 1998, HP filed a declaratory judgment action against him, and his attorneys were disqualified. That's when he first hooked up with the Niro Scavone law firm and Ray Niro. That second case involved U.S. Patent 5,424,780. Two ex parte reexaminations were filed on the '780 patent, and a reexam certificate issued in 2002.

In total, Cooper and TLC have filed at least 23 litigations against at least 44 defendants, and have obtained at least 34 settlements. They lost two cases. One involved a dismissal for lack of standing, which was affirmed on appeal. The other was a loss at a bench trial, where the district court found one patent invalid and the other not infringed. That particular case is on appeal to the Federal Circuit.

Niro Scavone has represented TLC and Cooper in about 12 of the 23 litigations, although there are a couple others recently filed in Texas where the firm may be behind the scenes but hasn't made an appearance. The three cases TLC filed in 2007, against Apple, Red Hat and Novell, and Google, all involved patents purchased from Xerox, and all three were filed in Marshall, Texas. The Apple case settled quickly, but the other two are still in the very early pleading stage.

The most recent litigation was just last Thursday, January 17, in the Northern District of Illinois. Acacia subsidiary IP Innovation & Cooper's Technology Licensing Corp., represented by Niro, sued Mitsubishi for infringement of the '780 patent, as well as U.S. Patents 6,529,637 and 6,870,964. Neither the '637 nor the '964 patents have been involved in any reexamination. The '964 is a continuation of the '637, which is a continuation-in-part of the '780. This is at least the tenth time the '780 patent family has been asserted in litigation by Cooper.

Other than the case up on appeal to the Federal Circuit and the 2 cases recently filed in Texas, the only other TLC case pending before last week was one brought by IP Innovation and TLC in Chicago in September 2005 against 9 defendants. The Fourth Amended Complaint in that litigation asserts 11 different patents, including the 3 asserted by IP Innovation and TLC in the Mitsubishi case (the 2005 case also includes co-plaintiffs New Medium/Acacia, and AV Technologies/Acacia. Evidently, each Acacia subsidiary teams with Cooper to assert different groups of patents).

So that's one story of the small American inventor at work, buying patents, forming shells, suing hundreds of companies. In both Cooper's case and the earlier story on Ware, they had patents that survived ex parte reexamination -- as many patents do. Nobody has tried to put Cooper's recent patents into inter partes reexamination. More likely, companies look at the vast portfolio, the number of patents asserted, the number of settlements, the high cost of patent litigation, and the chilling estoppel effect of inter partes reexamination (and recent slowness of the PTO Board of Patent Appeals), and decide to do what dozens others have done: settle.

Full post as published by Patent Troll Tracker on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).