Earlier this week, the district court of the Western District of Washington favoured Valve Corporation in its 2023 lawsuit against Leigh Rothschild and his associated companies, on all counts, including breach of contract and the violation of Washington’s Patent Troll Prevention and Consumer Protection Acts.
Rothschild is an inventor with a huge array of patents to his name, granted and pended, covering an extremely broad range of fields. He also owns or leads a host of companies that manage the business side of patents. In this particular legal case, Valve alleged that Rothschild himself, Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems LLC, Display Technologies LLC, Patent Asset Management LLC, Meyler Legal LLC, and Samuel Meyler were guilty of “bad-faith assertions of patent infringement”, amongst other things.
The patent in question is US8856221B2, a ‘system and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment’. Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems (RBDS) owns the rights to that patent, and in 2016, Valve obtained a “perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license” for it and others in Rothschild’s portfolio.
For context, I usually come across accounts posting something on social media without a source. Then I use a search engine to search some keywords from that claim (in this case Valve Rotschild lawsuit) and if multiple sources report on it then I select whatever headline looks appealing and contains decent looking information. I barely do any background checking on the websites so it’s possible I end on LLM websites. If the other user just told me “this LLM website is bad” I wouldn’t change anything but they also provided a good alternative to easily change the post to another article so I don’t mind.