WeChat and Line just got sued (and more could be coming)

Photo credit: Uniloc’s website is terrible.

These are the remnants of a bygone era, the bleached bones of a long-dead whale on the beach.

In the top left corner, there’s the company logo. Below it, in the center of the screen lies a large green blob and a smaller blueish blob with a “Members Only Log In” button. The button doesn’t work, and there’s nothing else there.

But lying just beneath that blank exterior is the skeleton of what must have once been a real website. There’s a full WordPress install that isn’t being used. Hidden as comments in the page’s source code is a navigation menu full of now-broken links to pages like “Incubation Lab” and “News.”

Also hidden: a proud introduction to the company that declares:

The spirit of innovation is alive and well at Uniloc. Uniloc’s story mirrors an American theme seen over and over during the last few decades: a company that is discovering, growing and innovating technology that is changing the way people live.

But these are the remnants of a bygone era, the bleached bones of a long-dead whale on the beach. Unilock is not an innovative tech company. Uniloc is a professional plaintiff, a patent owner that files lawsuits. In the opinion of many, Uniloc is notorious a patent troll.

The case against WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk

With little fanfare or warning, in late May Uniloc unleashed a barrage of litigation aimed at popular Asian messaging apps. On the 28th, it filed suit against Japanese messaging app Line. On the 30th, it followed up with suits against Korea’s KakaoTalk and China’s WeChat.

The cases against Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk are basically the same.

All three suits were filed at the US District Court in Marshall, Texas, which should come as no surprise – the Marshall court is notorious among tech companies because it is a favorite location for patent trolls. Juries in Marshall are sympathetic to patent-holding plaintiffs (they win 78 percent of the time) and cases are dealt with quickly.

And the cases against Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk are basically the same. Uniloc is accusing all three companies of violating two patents it owns related to the initiating of conference calls, specifically US patents 8,571,194 and 7,853,000. Basically, Uniloc is claiming that because all three apps allow users to initiate video and audio conference calls via an IM chat window, they’re infringing on Uniloc’s patents, which outline a similar system of conference calls initiated via IM software.

A history of “trolling”

Patent trolls come to Asia?