Free for a Fee

Last month, the EFF faced down a lawsuit claiming that one of its “Stupid Patent of the Month” blog posts illegally defamed the inventor, a patent lawyer named Scott Horstemeyer. Days after the lawsuit became public, it was dropped.

The series hasn’t skipped a beat, though, and the newest edition highlights another serial litigator with a ridiculous patent. Wetro Lan LLC believes that its US Patent No. 6,795,918 covers Internet firewalls, or as it says, a system of “filtering data packets” by “extracting the source, destination, and protocol information” and “dropping the received data packet if the extracted information indicates a request for access to an unauthorized service.”

“This month’s winner is a terrible patent,” writes EFF patent lawyer Daniel Nazer. “But it earns a special place in the Pantheon of stupid patents because it is being wielded in one of most outrageous trolling campaigns we have ever seen.”