The world famous entertainment company Netflix has been sued very recently by a company called Blackbird Technologies. Blackbird Technologies, infamously known as Patent Troll has sued the American company Netflix because of one of its offline download feature. The feature was introduced back in November. The company has been coined the term “Patent Troll” because this firm usually do not have any product or asset but a plethora of patents. These patents earn them profits from war of lawsuits. Hence, the term “troll”.
Before Netflix, several famous business giants had fallen prey for Blackbird Technologies’. The companies include SoundCloud, Vimeo, Starz, Mubi, and Studio 3 Partners. Now it’s time for Netflix to suffer the btyntggj All of these companies too have an offline downloading feature in their services. The lawsuits against Netflix were filed in Delaware Federal Court.
For your information, Blackbird Technologies currently owns 7,174,362 US Patents. The company deploys a method for supplying products from pre-stored digital data in response to demands transmitted via computer network. Originally issued in 2000 to Sungil Lee, a San Jose entrepreneur and business instructor, this company now survives on profits earned from legal wars on patents.
The patent abstract reads:
The present invention relates to a digital data duplication system that utilizes one or more computer networks to automate the process from order-taking to delivery, eliminating the need for human supervision. Customers enter requests for a given number of machine-readable articles containing digital data, typically compact disks. The requests are transferred to a website, which sends to a server electronic mails containing the details of the requests. Upon receiving an electronic mail, the server directs a printing device to produce mailing labels for shipment. The server has an internal archive of all data it uses to convert blank CD-Rs into the requested CDs, and is connected to a series of CD-R writing machines. The CD-R writing machine subsequently transfers the data in its cache onto the pre-loaded CD-Rs. After the data transfer is complete, the CDs embodying the requested information are automatically placed in a bin for shipment.
The company, however, did not directly target Netflix but does not necessarily discourage the legal pursuit of such companies.
