Last month, we noted that Rick Frenkel, who for months had been the anonymous "Troll Tracker," was
being sued for defamation for some of the posts on his blog. Now, it appears that another set of patent attorneys that Frenkel wrote about are
trying to get him into court. This concerned the rather infamous case of a patent attorney at a large law firm who got his own patents, and then used them to
sue companies who were clients of his own firm for patent infringement. The lawyer in question, Scott Harris, is represented by Niro Scavone, who was another target of Frenkel and whose named partner not only proudly claims that the term "patent troll" was based on him, but also put out a
bounty to anyone who could identify the Troll Tracker.
So why is Frenkel being dragged into the Harris case? Apparently Harris and his lawyers are trying to build a big conspiracy theory around Frenkel. Because Frenkel worked at Cisco, and Harris' former employer (Fish & Richardson) did work for Cisco, Frenkel's blog posts really were just a big plot to help out Fish & Richardson while devaluing Harris' patents. That sounds pretty far-fetched by any stretch of the imagination, and would require an awful lot of proof. But, what's most likely really happening is that the folks that Frenkel helped shed some light on are now taking advantage of the situation to drag him into court whenever and however possible.
This is quite tragic for a variety of reasons. No matter what one thinks of Frenkel's anonymity while working for Cisco, you cannot deny that he brought to light many of the shadier tactics being used by patent hoarding firms, often hiding behind shell corporation names and suing many companies at once. Since Frenkel stopped blogging, many of those stories are remaining underground. No one has stepped into the void, unfortunately, perhaps afraid that they, too, will become targets in various lawsuits. The information that Frenkel was bringing to light (while potentially biased by his position at Cisco) did help point a light at some questionable activities that had been hidden for far too long.
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