Watch what you say about lawyers, a continuing feature: the blog Troll Tracker has been critical of firms that make a practice of buying up patent rights to sue on them. Now co-founder Ray Niro of the Chicago plaintiffs firm Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro is threatening to sue Troll Tracker for alleged infringement of a patent on a technique sometimes used in web graphics, JPEG decompression. (If a website posts graphics at all, there is a good chance that it is in similar violation of this asserted patent.) Niro also wants the anonymous blawger’s identity unmasked and is offering a bounty toward that end. (TrollTracker, Dec. 4; John Bringardner, “A Bounty of $5,000 to Name Troll Tracker”, IP Law & Business, Dec. 4; via Ambrogi, who appends an extensive list of blogs commenting on the story).
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In bloggers and the law; legal blogs; online speech; Patent Troll Tracker; patent trolls; watch what you say about lawyers
If you want to fetch an anonymous blogger into court because they said mean things, then there’s a procedure for that. See, for instance, Greenbaum v Google and Mobilisa v John Doe 1.
(Both from EFF’s Manalapan v Moskovitz case page.)
Ray Niro has chosen an attempt to circumvent that procedure.