Austin Meyer
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2016–2022
21:37 · 464K views · Jun 14, 2016
Austin Meyer, developer of the X-Plane flight simulator, explains how he was sued by a patent troll over a trivial claim about an app's license server. He walks through how the shell-company litigation works and why ignoring the suit makes things worse.
HN commenters pass it around as an eye-opening first-hand account of patent trolling and the Texas courts that favor it.
8 comments from Hacker News
This video from Austin Meyer (creator of X-Plane) is pretty eye-opening: this video Apparently there are TWO judges in the district, BOTH of whose own sons are lawyers in the same district. And BOTH sons handle a lot of the patent litigation, in front of their own fathers, the judges. Pretty incredible. Watch the video starting at about 5 minutes to see it.
This is great. Would like to see more of these kinds of efforts. Just watched The Patent Scam video by Austin Meyer (developer of X-Plane flight sim who was sued by patent trolls). this video That kind of stuff makes my blood boil.
For anyone looking for an ~20 minute intro to why this is a big deal and the impact it has on small tech companies: this video tl;dw: There are some over-broad patents on usage of very common technologies ( using wifi or selling on the google play store are two egregious examples) that are being used as a bludgeon against small and medium sized firms that can't afford to defend themselves. It costs about $3 million to defend against such a suit, and the Eastern district is known for refusing to force plaintiffs to pay defendant's attorney's fees even if the suit is ultimately dropped.
Just watched this video [1] by someone who got sued because his "android app uses a license server". Those patent troll shell companies sue one victim after another and forward the incoming money to other companies. So there's no use in going after them directly. The victim can negotiate better terms if he signs a non-disclosure agreement. The patent trolls are protected by politicians, judges and lawyers. [1] this video
So there is a judge out there, and his son is a practicing lawyer who reps. PT and PT victims. Basically legal racketeering. It would be interesting to see emails dumped from these guys, and how much corruption is taking place. this video its like 5 min in.