Dowell Baker, a law firm specializing in patent litigation in Lafayette, Indiana, finds companies to target in a couple different ways. The firm’s client, ArrivalStar, holds 34 U.S. patents, all related to the idea of tracking a vehicle in motion and then alerting people, through some communications device, of when it may arrive or whether it’s running late. As you might imagine, many entities – airlines, school buses, freight-tracking services, package-delivery companies – do something quite similar to this. And Dowell Baker believes they’re all infringing on these patents.
The firm scours for potential infringers on the Internet. Sometimes, companies that have already been sued by ArrivalStar – and now license its patents – will tip off the firm to its competitors. And then there are the really easy targets: public transit agencies. They’re quite public about the cell phone apps and notifications that you can sign up for, as a rider, to keep tabs on buses and trains. And so Dowell Baker signs up for them, too.
“We had to get a separate phone account,” says partner Anthony Dowell, “because no one wanted to get all these notifications on their phone.”
This is a strange story. And this detail probably conveys that best: There is a dedicated cell phone sitting in a law office in Indiana pinging at all hours of the day with alerts about bus delays and approaching trains in cities across the country.
The case is particularly odd given that ArrivalStar sells no product or service. It isn’t really competing with any of these companies, certainly not the transit agencies. When the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority texts its riders about a waylaid train, that service doesn’t cut into ArrivalStar’s profits. But the company, while it makes little else, controls these patents.
Some of them date back to the mid-1990s, when an inventor named Martin Kelly Jones initially filed them. Today, a company called Melvino Technologies Limited, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands, owns all of his patents. And ArrivalStar, registered in Luxembourg, has the exclusive rights to license them.
Together, Melvino and ArrivalStar have sued at least 10 public transit agencies and threatened legal action against at least eight others. Noticing the pattern, tech and transit advocates have begun to flag ArrivalStar as a “patent troll,” a company that exists solely to sue supposed patent infringers for financial gain. Most perplexing to the many people involved is this question: How does anyone own the rights to the obvious idea of alerting people when their train, or bus, or plane might pull in?
“It’s a very old conflict in the U.S. patent system,” Dowell says. “The Wright brothers never manufactured an airplane, but they filed for and obtained the first patent and engaged in litigation for years about it.”
ArrivalStar’s critics frame this a little differently.
“It’s kind of like a hostage situation,” says Julie Samuels, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Because settling it is always going to be cheaper than litigating. When you start suing cash-strapped local governments, they don’t have the resources to fight back.”
Fighting a suit like this can run into the millions of dollars. So far, every transit agency ArrivalStar has sued has settled, as have more than a hundred private companies. No one has ever taken one of these cases all the way to trial, where a judge might begin to sort out exactly what the broad language in these patents truly means.
“It’s a mess,” Samuels says. “Not to sound glib, but you’re talking about taxpayer dollars when these cities have no money to start with. And that’s not what we want our cities focused on now – or ever. But right now, it seems especially egregious.”
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