Papers were filed Monday, and both sides have dropped their claims.Įugene Kaspersky, in his own blog post on the case, explains the importance of fighting patent trolls, and how this went down, noting that it was pretty clear that Wetro Lan’s lawyers knew “precious little” about what they were actually suing over and also that they “appear to have an incomplete knowledge of IP law.” Recognizing that once Kaspersky had the upper hand and knew it would win, any time wasted in court was lost money to Wetro Lan - hence the offer to “settle” the case only if Wetro Lan paid them. “Why don’t you pay us $10,000?”Īfter some back-and-forth, Wetro Lan’s lawyer agreed to pay Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. “We said, actually, $10,000 is fine,” said Kniser. “Kaspersky won’t pay these people even if it’s a nickel,” he said. Kniser tried to explain that it didn’t matter how far the company dropped the demand. Eventually, the demands reached $10,000?an amount that’s extremely low in the world of patent litigation. Wetro Lan’s settlement demands kept dropping, down from its initial “amicable” demand of $60,000. So they started taking weird positions, basically saying, ‘Well, you can only configure it a little bit.’ I think that would have gotten them in trouble as far as validity goes.”
“Their patent was for a firewall that’s not user-configurable,” Kniser said in an interview with Ars. As Joe Mullin at Ars Technica explains, by the end of the case, Wetro Lan had to pay Kaspersky to get the company to agree to let the case die.ĭuring discovery, Kaspersky’s lawyer was able to discover the settlements that Wetro Lan actually got out of other companies, while also making it quite clear to Wetro Lan, that it’s claims in this suit were completely bogus. Things didn’t quite go according to Wetro Lan’s plan. One company it went after was Kaspersky Labs, which it eventually sued in East Texas (naturally). Two years ago, we wrote about the patent troll with the somewhat on-the-nose name of Wetro Lan (get it? “we trollin'”) that was threatening lots of companies.
But it appears Kaspersky Labs has taken this up a notch. Part of that standing firm was that when he eventually “settled” the case, he demanded that he be allowed to reveal that the settlement was for $0 (usually trolls require a gag clause on settlements to avoid anyone finding out what happened). And we covered the case of Fark’s Drew Curtis, a few years back, who simply refused to give in when a patent troll tried to shake him down. Newegg, famously, has its “Never Settle” mantra for dealing with patent trolls. We’ve talked a lot over the years about the importance of standing up to patent trolls. Thu, Aug 31st 2017 12:02pm - Mike Masnick
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