Acacia, one of the larger and more well known patent hoarding firms, has followed in the footsteps of other recent lawsuits where the patent holder sues a bunch of companies at once. The general reason for doing so is in order to pick the jurisdiction. The fear is that if someone sues just one or two companies, then others may look to have a more favorable district court give a declaratory judgment saying they don't infringe. In this case (which, surprisingly, does not take place in Marshall, Texas, but in Cleveland, Ohio), Acacia (or, more accurately, a subsidiary of Acacia) is using an old patent on computer-aided transcription and applying it to predictive text systems. Of course, predictive texting systems are quite common these days, making it easy to sue 23 different companies for infringement, including Microsoft, Nokia, IBM, Samsung, Sony, Qualcomm, RIM, Nintendo, Motorola, AT&T, Verizon and a bunch of others along those lines. Not surprising to see this from Acacia, but it's yet another overly broad patent being applied completely outside the space it was intended for, and being used to basically shakedown a ton of companies for offering useful products that were designed entirely independently of this patent.

In more positive Acacia news however, the company (or, again, a subsidiary) has lost one of its other patent lawsuits against Microsoft. Turns out the jury (in Marshall, Texas, yes) didn't believe Microsoft violated the patent in question. Won't stop Acacia from filing more such lawsuits, but always nice to find out that patent hoarders don't always win.

Acacia has become one of the most hated firms by technology companies that actually do stuff. That's because Acacia is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) firms out there in the business of buying up patents solely to sue companies. Acacia learned a while ago, though, that it was best to keep its name out of many of these suits, so it apparently tries to set up subsidiaries for many of the patents it buys (sometimes giving them silly names to make people think the companies actually do something). Now, one of those subsidiaries, named Refined Recommendation Corporation is suing Netflix over a patent it holds on optimizing interest potential. It's a patent on the idea of making recommendations or presenting specific information based on user actions. I can recall both individuals and companies working on similar things well before this patent was applied for in 2000, but that's a different issue altogether. Does anyone believe that Netflix (and plenty of other companies) wouldn't be doing content recommendations for people without this particular "breakthrough"?

Jon writes in to let us know that a small patent holding firm, IP Innovation, has sued Red Hat and Novell over patent infringement concerning a ridiculously broad patent. As the Groklaw report outlines, the suing company is actually a subsidiary of Acacia, which is considered to be one of the more egregious firms in using bad patents to squeeze money out of companies. Groklaw also notes that Acacia has recently hired a bunch of execs from Microsoft, leading to the conspiracy theory that Steve Ballmer's recent predictions of patent lawsuits against Red Hat were more than random speculation. I'm not willing to go that far just yet, but as you can see from Ars Technica's breakdown of the patent earlier this year (when the company sued Apple), it describes very broadly the concept of workspaces in a computer user interface. This is yet another example of the worst of our patent system at work. Companies that offer innovative products getting sued using vague, overly broad patents on obvious ideas that never should have been granted in the first place.