Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as Arrivalstar, is one of the most prolific patent trolls ever. It has filed more than 500 lawsuits alleging patent infringement. Despite having filed so many cases, it has never had a court rule on the validity of its patents. In recent years, Shipping & Transit’s usual practice is to dismiss its claims as soon as a defendant spends resources to fight back. A district court in California issued an order (PDF) this week ordering Shipping & Transit to pay a defendant's attorney's fees. The court found that Shipping & Transit has engaged in a pattern of “exploitative litigation.”Shipping & Transit owns a number of patents that relate to vehicle tracking. We’ve written about its patent trolling on numerous occasions. In many cases, Shipping & Transit asserted its patents against businesses that simply sent email to customers with a tracking number. In other cases, it has sued municipal transport agencies and logistics companies.The recent fee award is from a case called Shipping & Transit LLC v. Hall Enterprises, Inc. After getting sued, Hall told Shipping & Transit that it should dismiss its claims because its patents are invalid under Alice v. CLS Bank. Shipping & Transit refused. Hall then went to the expense of preparing and filing a motion for judgment on the pleadings (PDF) arguing that Shipping & Transit’s patents are invalid. In response, Shipping & Transit voluntarily dismissed its claims. Hall then filed a motion for attorney’s fees (PDF).In considering the motion for fees, the court first considered the merits of Hall’s judgment on the pleadings. The court found that the asserted patent claims were directed to the abstract idea of “monitoring and reporting the location of a vehicle” and that they do not contain an inventive concept sufficient to transfer the abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. The court also concluded Shipping & Transit’s legal arguments in defense of its patents were “objectively unreasonable in light of the Supreme Court’s Alice decision and the cases that applied that decision to invalidate comparable claims.”Read the full post at EFF.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:07/07/2017