For those who follow the tech industry on a regular basis, you’re surely aware of the ‘patent troll’ problem that plagues the industry. For those not familiar, there are many companies who either buy patents from other companies or file for any and all type of patents and due to the broken system in the US, are in return granted such patents. Once granted, instead of actually producing any products or services with the given patents, the companies begun to sue any and all that they can if they feel like they can extract any money from the case. At best, a company shells out millions of dollars towards lawyers when they could have invested the money into the company and at worst, companies simply close up shop if they cannot afford to fend off such abuse.

Now thanks to a federal judge, Sony and others will have one less thing to worry about from patent licensing firm WiLAN.

According to Bloomberg, Sony, HTC, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent were all sued by WiLAN, a patent licensing firm who makes no real products. In Sony’s case, the Canadian based company targeted phones made by Sony when it filed suit in 2010. Now, a federal judge in Tyler, Texas has cleared Sony of any infringement on the said patents. Equally, the judge has found that HTC, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent were innocent of any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman for Taoyuan, Taiwan-based HTC, said:

 HTC believes that Wi-Lan has exaggerated the scope of its patent in order to extract unwarranted licensing royalties from entities who have been focused on bringing innovation forward in their own products, 

Update:
Thanks to our eagle eyed reader Jessica for pointing out some editing mistakes in the article! See what happens when you don’t let your editor comb through an article before you publish it?

Discuss:

Do you believe that the patent industry is broken?