Free for a Fee

Judge: EFF’s “Stupid Patent of the Month” clearly protected by Constitution

30 11 2017

A federal judge in California has ruled in favor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation after the organization was recently sued over its “Stupid Patent of the Month” blog posts. As a result, the advocacy group is not required to remove a recent post simply because an Australian patent entity (often called “trolls”) doesn’t like it.

The case began back in April 2017 when EFF countersued an Australian company that it previously dubbed as a “classic patent troll” in a June 2016 blog post entitled: “Stupid Patent of the Month: Storage Cabinets on a Computer.”

In 2016, that company, Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. (GEMSA), managed to get an Australian court to order EFF to remove its post—but EFF did not comply. In January 2017, Pasha Mehr, an attorney representing GEMSA, further demanded that the article be removed and that EFF pay $750,000. EFF still left the post up and then sued regarding the Australian court’s injunction.

The content in this post was found at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/eff-need-not-remove-stupid-patent-post-about-australian-troll-judge-finds/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.