Who Will This Patent Troll Target Next?

A Texas-based firm called TPQ Development has been filing hundreds of patent violation cases against companies such as tech giants Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) in the hopes of making big money. The latest targets of patent troll TPQ include Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Wind River, and Hertz (NYSE:HTZ), with the allegation that these companies violated a patent for using a shared seed value to generate pseudo-random key values at transmitter and receiver.

“The business model is based on the fact that the cost of defending a lawsuit and the risk of a large damages award as a result of being found to infringe a patent is so high that it’s worth paying a perhaps substantial sum of money in order to extricate yourself from that lawsuit. When you scale that up to hundreds of companies there’s quite a bit of money to be made,” said Jim Denaro, an attorney for the CipherLaw Group.

Having filed a hundred patent infringement cases in the last year, it appears as though TPQ will not stop trolling anytime in the near future.

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