Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things.
This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is a great example of that. U.S. Patent No. 9,054,860 has been used by a company called Digital Verification Services, LLC, (DVS) to sue more than 50 companies that provide different types of e-signature software.
There’s no evidence that the inventor of this patent, Leigh Rothschild, ever created his own e-signature software. But in patent law, that doesn’t matter. He acquired this patent in 2015, by adding a trivial, almost meaningless limitation to an application that the U.S. Patent Office had spent the previous seven years rejecting.
You can’t learn much about how to verify digital identities from the patent owned by Digital Verification Services. But the breadth of work on actual digital verification can be
— source eff.org | Joe Mullin | Jan 30, 2023