Free for a Fee

Anyone who visited Soverain Software’s website could be forgiven for believing it’s a real company. There are separate pages for “products,” “services,” and “solutions.”  There’s the “About Us” page. There are phone numbers and e-mail addresses for sales and tech support, even a login page for customers.It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its Web page? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that originally created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.