Legal News

Bounty Hunter Outs Author of Patent Troll Tracker Blog

By Dan Slater

The hitherto anonymous author of the widely-read Patent Troll Tracker blog — a blog that reports on companies that critics say hold patents solely in order to sue for infringement — has been outed. And it wasn’t voluntary. A Chicago lawyer named Raymond Niro Sr. (pictured), who was criticized on the blog last summer, offered a $15,000 bounty to anyone willing to expose the Patent Troll Tracker’s identity. (Here’s a report from The Recorder.)

On Saturday, Niro got his man. Here he is, in the Patent Troll Tracker’s own words:

Yes, I have been unmasked. . . . I got an anonymous email, from the guy who probably collected the bounty, telling me I better tell everyone who I am (and he clearly knew), or else he would take care of it for me. . . . So now that it’s happened, let me introduce myself. My name is Rick Frenkel. I started in IP over 10 years ago, as a law clerk at Lyon & Lyon in Los Angeles. After a few years there as a law clerk and attorney, I litigated patent cases for several years at Irell & Manella. Two years ago I moved to the Valley and went in-house at Cisco. In my career, I have represented plaintiffs, defendants, large companies, small companies, individual inventors, universities, and everything in between. I currently work at Cisco.

Frenkel, a director in Cisco’s IP group, wrote that he started the blog out of frustration because he 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.” Frenkel says he wanted to blog to be a source of information about patent trolls, and to stand as a counterpoint to “the vast array of anti-patent-reform bloggers out there . . . .” As for the reward, Niro reportedly said he still doesn’t know who the e-mailer is, and has yet to receive a claim on the bounty.

Why did Frenkel choose to write under a nom de plume? “For one, I really didn’t want the publicity,” he said. “Second, I feared that someone would claim to have the patent on blogging, and I might face a retaliatory lawsuit. I was close, no?”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 26, 2008 (boomark / email).