A decentralized finance (DeFi) advocacy body has asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to review a patent owned by a company it has accused of being a "patent troll," a company that intends to benefit from patent lawsuits.
In a 9/11 blog mail The DeFi Education Fund (DEF) said on September 7 that it filed a more than 90-page petition with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in an attempt to cancel a patent owned by True Return Systems.
Granted in 2018, the patent claims a process for “linking off-chain data to a blockchain,” DEF Chief Legal Officer Amanda Tuminelli said in a Sept. 11 X (Twitter) post.
Tuminelli claimed True Return tried to sell his patent as a non-fungible token (NFT). Finding no buyer, it filed a lawsuit against DeFi protocols MakerDAO and Compound Finance in October.
4/ When that didn't work, in October 2022, TRS sued MakerDAO and the Compound Protocol in two separate federal court proceedings, alleging patent infringement.
File links: https://t.co/w47v7fAAEthttps://t.co/ExTapxhKNq—Amanda Tuminelli (@amandatums) September 11, 2023
"Clearly [True Return’s] The goal was to name defendants who could not respond to the lawsuit so that [it] I could get a default judgment,” Tuminelli said.
He stated that True Return would attempt to enforce the court ruling against the token holders and repeat the process with other protocols "that cannot challenge them in court or do not have the resources to do so."
DEF stated that the True Return technology in the patent is not new at the time it was granted and claims to highlight similar existing technologies, such as the interplanetary file system (IPFS) With decentralized storage platforms Sia, Storj and Swarm.
8/ In our petition, we noted that the “invention” in the patent was not new in 2018. There are many examples of “prior art” that the Patent Board can examine: examples: a NASDAQ patent linking patent data prices with -Chain-to-chain transaction historyhttps://t.co/amz3jREab7 pic.twitter.com/RJ3VVGFeEj
—Amanda Tuminelli (@amandatums) September 11, 2023
True Return Systems acknowledged Cointelegraph's request for comment but did not immediately provide comment.
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DEF said it launched the petition to the USPTO to defend the ability to use and develop open source software, to stop any potential True Return to plans. sue crypto projects and assist in the legal defense of MakerDAO and Compound.
True Return has three months to optionally respond to the petition, after six months the USPTO must make a decision whether to move forward with patent review, where it has 12 months to decide if the patent should be canceled.
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