By Tomas Camacho, www.brightideascomputing.com
If you have a small to medium business, including a home office, and you have a multi-function printer/scanner/fax in your business that happens to incorporate certain technology, then YOU could become the target of a patent violation lawsuit filed by one of these patent trolls.
Here’s how they work…
First, someone calls your office pretending to be a printer and scanner repair service and they will sometimes ask for the make and model of your printer/scanner because “someone submitted a repair order and they forgot to include the make and model.” (Incidentally, we also received such a phone call and Petra politely declined to give them any information about our office equipment.)
YOU innocently give them the information before you realize that you didn’t submit any such work order. Then BINGO! About 2 weeks later your receive a demand letter from one of these patent troll attorneys demanding payment of anything from $1000 to $5000 or even more. More often than not, it’s cheaper to just pay them off than it is to fight them in court.
Remember, it’s NO ONE’S BUSINESS what equipment you have in your office, even if it’s a home office. So beware of such phone calls.
Since when does a retail customer or user get sued for patent infringement? I thought it is the equipment manufacturer.
I found an older article that goes into more detail on the issue.
“He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”
Original article… http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/