A reader who wishes to remain anonymous has tipped me to the SCOTUS decision that will effectively bury patent trolls. This is incredible news for the field of teledildonics invention and innovation, which has been kept in a stranglehold by a single patent and its enforcers for several years. It’s all thanks to eBay. Snip from Forbes:
“The U.S. Supreme Court has tipped the balance in patent disputes ever so slightly toward the users of patented technology and away from inventors, owners of intellectual property and the hated “patent trolls”–companies that make money by suing for infringement of patents they own but don’t use.
(…)
“The high court’s decision deals a blow to patent trolls, which are notorious for using the threat of permanent injunction to extort hefty fees in licensing negotiations as well as huge settlements from companies they have accused of infringing. Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada’s Research in Motion (nasdaq: RIMM – news – people ) forked over to patent-holding company NTP to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service.
“Patent trolls have thrived as American industries have churned out more and more high-tech gizmos containing dozens or even hundreds of patented bits of technology. In accepting the case and ruling as they did, the justices seemed to have had it in mind to hem in their power.”
What does this have to do with teledildonics, exactly? Everything. Patent trolling is effectively the same thing as using organized crime tactics with inventions, but under federal protection. Now that’s no longer the case. The troll(s) with the teledildonics patent (PDF) created it back in 1998 loosely based on the FUFME conceptual art project (reposted here), and subsequently did nothing with it — but had the legal huevos to make it as far and ranging of a computer-controlled sex toy patent as possible. Back when I wrote my article on teledildonics I interviewed Steve Rhodes (“The Sinulator“) about his teledidonic device and company, completely unaware of patent trolls and how they operate. He told me about the patent holder, how he’d been contacted by the owner and was then (at the time) acting as an enforcer for the patent holder (from what I gathered) in exchange for being able to move forward with his company and ideas. In retrospect, he explained to me that he was acting on the patent holder’s behalf and informing teledildonics inventors that they were in violation of the patent… though he sold it to me like he was just a Silicon Valley guy who was working to create a set of standards for web-controlled sex toys. I quoted him as saying, “Remember what it was like when you had to decide between a BETA machine and a VHS? If we can all agree on basic standards it’s like when the water rises, all the boats rise — if everyone can use the toys interchangeably, then we’ll all be successful.”
Now I know what this really meant. And you know what? Fuck those guys. With the new SCOTUS ruling, I think it’s time we made some *good* teledildonic toys and open sourced the hell out of them.
Update, anonymous reader comment: “This doesn’t mean patent trolls are out of business, just that their primary weapon is far less useful than it used to be, given that SCOTUS used whether they’re using it or not as a criteria with respect to the preliminary injunction. One still has to have the resources to defend against the lawsuit… Here’s an analysis of the decision by a patent attorney on groklaw (link). I also still believe that the [teledildonics] patent can be reverse-engineered around or broken.”
