Adam Carolla is an American radio personality, comedian, actor and podcaster. He hosts The Adam Carolla Show, a talk show distributed as a podcast which set the record as the "most downloaded podcast" as judged by Guinness World Records in 2011.
A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing. Podcasts are primarily an audio medium, with some programs offering a supplemental video component. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient and integrated way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices. There are also podcast search engines, which help users find and share podcast episodes.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is the independent nonprofit technology transfer organization serving the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Morgridge Institute for Research. It provides significant research support, granting tens of millions of dollars to the university each year and contributing to the university's "margin of excellence".
In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art, often through hardball legal tactics. Patent trolls often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question. However, some entities which do not practice their asserted patent may not be considered "patent trolls" when they license their patented technologies on reasonable terms in advance.
The multinational technology corporation Apple Inc. has been a participant in various legal proceedings and claims since it began operation and, like its competitors and peers, engages in litigation in its normal course of business for a variety of reasons. In particular, Apple is known for and promotes itself as actively and aggressively enforcing its intellectual property interests. From the 1980s to the present, Apple has been plaintiff or defendant in civil actions in the United States and other countries. Some of these actions have determined significant case law for the information technology industry and many have captured the attention of the public and media. Apple's litigation generally involves intellectual property disputes, but the company has also been a party in lawsuits that include antitrust claims, consumer actions, commercial unfair trade practice suits, defamation claims, and corporate espionage, among other matters.
Uniloc Corporation is a company founded in Australia in 1992.
Vringo was a technology company that became involved in the worldwide patent wars. The company won a 2012 intellectual property lawsuit against Google, in which a U.S. District Court ordered Google to pay 1.36 percent of U.S. AdWords sales. Analysts estimated Vringo's judgment against Google to be worth over $1 billion. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned the District Court's ruling on appeal in August 2014 in a split 2-1 decision, which Intellectual Asset Magazine called "the most troubling case of 2014." Vringo appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Vringo also pursued worldwide litigation against ZTE Corporation in twelve countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, India, Spain, Netherlands, Romania, China, Malaysia, Brazil and the United States. The high profile nature of the intellectual property suits filed by the firm against large corporations known for anti-patent tendencies has led some commentators to refer to the firm as a patent vulture or patent troll.
A copyright troll is a party that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works.
Hotfile was a one-click file hosting website founded by Hotfile Corp in 2006 in Panama City, Panama. On December 4, 2013, Hotfile ceased all operations, the same day as signing a $4 million settlement with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the settlement had previously been misreported as $80 million.
IPCom GmbH & Co. KG is a German intellectual property rights licensing and technology R&D company.
Lodsys, LLC was an American patent holding company located in Marshall, Texas that brought patent infringement lawsuits against a variety of companies in the US. Numerous app development enterprises accused them of "patent trolling".
The smartphone wars or smartphone patents licensing and litigation refers to commercial struggles among smartphone manufacturers including Sony Mobile, Google, Apple Inc., Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Huawei, LG Electronics, ZTE and HTC, by patent litigation and other means. The conflict is part of the wider "patent wars" between technology and software corporations.
Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. was the first of a series of ongoing lawsuits between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics regarding the design of smartphones and tablet computers; between them, the companies made more than half of smartphones sold worldwide as of July 2012. In the spring of 2011, Apple began litigating against Samsung in patent infringement suits, while Apple and Motorola Mobility were already engaged in a patent war on several fronts. Apple's multinational litigation over technology patents became known as part of the mobile device "smartphone patent wars": extensive litigation in fierce competition in the global market for consumer mobile communications. By August 2011, Apple and Samsung were litigating 19 ongoing cases in nine countries; by October, the legal disputes expanded to ten countries. By July 2012, the two companies were still embroiled in more than 50 lawsuits around the globe, with billions of dollars in damages claimed between them. While Apple won a ruling in its favor in the U.S., Samsung won rulings in South Korea, Japan, and the UK. On June 4, 2013, Samsung won a limited ban from the U.S. International Trade Commission on sales of certain Apple products after the commission found Apple had violated a Samsung patent, but this was vetoed by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.
Rockstar Consortium Inc., originally named Rockstar Bidco, is a consortium formed to negotiate licensing for patents acquired from the bankrupt multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer Nortel. Members of the consortium are Apple Inc., BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony. Rockstar is a patent holding non-practicing entity (NPE) and submitted the winning US$4.5 billion bid for the Nortel patents at a week-long auction held in New York in June 2011.
Soverain Software LLC was a Chicago-based company which owned patents for its ecommerce technology products. The company held patents for digital shopping carts commonly used on e-commerce websites, such as Amazon.com and collected royalties on these patents, but ultimately their patents were invalidated. Soverain Software has been characterized as a patent troll.
VirnetX is a publicly traded Internet security software and technology company based in Zephyr Cove, Nevada. VirnetX has been described as being a patent troll, accused of marketing no actual products or services and instead earning its revenue through licensing patents and suing anyone that infringes them. The company has won intellectual property litigation against various technology companies. Kendall Larsen is the company's CEO.
The Innovation Act of the 113th Congress is a bill that would change the rules and regulations surrounding patent infringement lawsuits in an attempt to reduce patent lawsuits.
MPHJ Technology Investments is a Waco, Texas-based company that has been called the poster child for "patent trolls" due to its practice of suing small businesses for patent infringement for using the scan-to-email function on their own office equipment. The company's argument is that they own the patent for the networked scan-to-email process and so are entitled to payments for each worker at a business that uses this function.
TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. ___ (2017), was a United States Supreme Court case concerning the venue in patent infringement lawsuits.
Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene's Energy Group, LLC, 584 U.S. ___ (2018), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the inter partes review process granted by Congress to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for challenging the validity of patents, rather than a jury trial, is constitutional and did not violate either Article III of the Constitution nor the Seventh Amendment.