A Washington jury has favored Valve in its lawsuit against the “patent troll” inventor Leigh Rothschild and a myriad of his associated companies for breaching a contract and violating a state patent protection law.
According to reports by Bloomberg Law and PC Gamer, the US District Court for the Western District of Washington favored Valve on all counts as part of a lawsuit that dates back to July 2023. In a minute filed on February 17 and uploaded by Bloomberg Law, the count determined that Rothschild and his affiliates violated Washington’s Patent Troll Prevention Act and Consumer Protection Act, as well as breached the contract.
Rothschild and Valve have a storied history, with the two being in and out of courts since at least 2016. The inventor has an assortment of patents, both granted and pending, under his name that extends to a broad array of fields, including barcodes and QR codes. Many of his companies deal in patents, too. For example, Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems (RBDS) owns patent US8856221B2, which is a “system and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment.” Valve obtained a “perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license” for it and others in Rothschild’s portfolio in 2016. Rothschild sued Valve in 2022 for patent infringement, then again in 2023 over US8856221B2.
Valve has alleged in this lawsuit that Rothschild and several of his companies named in the lawsuit–RBDS, Display Technologies LLC, Patent Asset Management LLC, Meyler Legal LLC, and Samuel Meyler–were guilty of “bad-faith assertions of patent infringement.” The company claimed that this litigation created “threats over software technology Valve can legally use,” effectively making “patent trolls” easier to target.
Patent trolls are understood as actions performed by an individual or a company, in which a patent is filed but never used and that individual or company issues meritless infringement allegations to obtain payouts that are generally less than the cost of the litigation itself.
Rothschild and Valve have yet to publicly comment on the ruling, but Rothschild must pay damages of up to at $25,000, declare the patent discussed in the lawsuit is invalid, and provide injuctive relief to Valve.