The disease that is Minkus Minkus [1] is still unfortunately on everyone’s mind here in Las Vegas and one of the first things we could personally share with software vendors who were at #dse2011 was confirmation of the puppet master behind the madness.
As we wrote back in August 2010 [2] it appears that the business behind all of this is Juridica Capital Management which in turn is owned by Juridica Investment Ltd.
As it trades on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM: JIL) you could even buy shares in these tossers, trade against any mitigation against yourselves and make ’em even richer for doing nothing.
You can see where and when they bought the patent from Motorola back in June, we quote “On 4 June 2010, Juridica made a $1.5 million investment in a new patent matter designated Case 0210-M. This is the Company’s second acquisition of a patent portfolio asset directly from a Fortune 500 company” from this public document here [3].
The Minkus patent is Case number 0210-m shown. It upsets us that many software vendors have already ‘folded’ and settled. In our mind (and more importantly to many who have been in this industry 20+ years) this case has no legs and if the industry were ONLY to stick together it could fight it easily.