TIL that in 2011 the French government "invested" 100 million Euro to setup a company that was supposed to monetise patents by suing all around the planet. Despite some minimal "success" with an NFC patent, the concept that I would personally call patent trolling wasn't delivering the expected ROI (Return on Investment) and in 2022 the plug was pulled. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Brevets
One of the patents they tried to monetise came from Nokia (filed 2008, granted 2010), then transferred to France Brevets (2013), who in turn transferred it to Burley Licensing LLC, Texas (2021), who in turn moved it to Nimitz Technologies LLC, Texas, 14 days later which finally sued 11 companies for patent violation. They didn't succeed in court. The patent is US 7,848,328 B2 and the claims are as vague as you would expect ;)
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8e/a9/d6/b55ae845972bfb/US7848328.pdf
Should you read about a patent case somewhere, here are the things you should know:
- design patents are NOT patents. They are more like registered designs.
- the *only* important thing about a patent are the claims. You can safely ignore all the descriptions, graphics and other stuff. Read the claims. The first one is the most important
- Patents expire after 20 years (or missed fee payment, whichever comes first)
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- Patents also protect retroactively (12 months before filing date in most jurisdictions), meaning that prior art that could invalidate the patent must be publicly known before that priority date
- Most patent cases don't go to court, far more often some kind of deal with license payments is offered to avoid that
I am not a lawyer, but I am quite an expert in the patent field since 2002 when I joined the fight against software patents in the EU.
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@jwildeboer This might be a wording issue ... but i'm not aware of a jurisdiction that provides protection retroactively. Patents are protected from the priority date which is the filing date. The granting date might be later - after some (or many) iterations of checks by the patent office. The 12 (or 18) months time is the publication date which follows the filing date.