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Patent Troll Tracker Litigation Update

By Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog

Joe Mullen, reporter at IP Law & Business magazine and author of the Prior Art Blog has some additional information on the Ward/Albritton lawsuit against Frenkel and Cisco (see 271 Blog post below). As many have noticed already, the Ward complaint "making the rounds" is an amended complaint. According to the the case docket in Gregg County District Court (link), the case was originally filed as John Ward, Jr. v. John Doe et al. on Nov. 7, 2007, and it is presumed that the complaint was filed with the notion of deposing someone at Google, who oversees the Blogger.com sevice used by Frenkel.

Since filing the complaint, the timelines are as follows:

Jan. 24: Petition to depose granted.

Feb. 23: Troll Tracker is revealed to be Rick Frenkel, an IP director at Cisco Systems.

Feb. 27: Ward Jr. filed an amended complaint claiming defamation against Cisco and Frenkel.

March 3: Eric Albritton files a separate complaint against Cisco and Frenkel.

This is going to be an interesting case to watch. According to Joe, there appear to be some discrepancies in the Troll Tracker posts that are alleged to contain the defamatory statements. The original post-in-question was changed by Frenkel after receiving additional information from a reader. Frenkel acknowledged those changes when they were made. However, only the original post was submitted to the court. Read Joe's post in its entirety here.

Also, as noted by Dennis at Patently-O, the PACER filing information still reflected that the case had been originally filed on the 15th, but the PACER complaint filing date now indicated October 16 (see here and here).

Full post as published by Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).