tldr; The patent troll Jason Nguyen of Altair Logix couldn’t shake us down so he dropped the case. It cost us $12,645.
You can read our first post about this troll and other forms of extortion here.
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Things of note: Altair Logix was formed June 12, 2018, or three months after the patent expired on February 27th, 2018. Patents are really screwed up investment vehicles that change value over time. In this case, Jason, smelling potential money, purchased an expired patent ‘434 from Huawei and then formed a shell company to start suing people.
It’s unknown if ARM would indemnify licensees against patent suits, ARM has the resources to stop many of the patent trolls, we hope they consider doing that for the open-source hardware community and companies.
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Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Thanks for posting this about the patent trolls. Kudos to Adafruit and Sparkfun for fighting the good fight!