How Oregon's Top Wildlife Official Got Sued Over His State's Hunting App
from the can-you-patent-following-state-laws? dept
What if you could get a patent on a new government program? Then, you could ask for the government to pay you royalties just for running that program. Nice work, if you can get it.
Oregon resident Iiley Thompson is the named inventor on U.S. Patent No. 10,257,651, ?Mobile electronic device for identifying and recording an animal harvest.? Shortly after his patent issued in 2019, Thompson?s lawyers sent a letter to the Oregon Department of Justice, suggesting that the Oregon government take a license to his patent.1
Thompson claims that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife?s MyODFW app, which allows hunters and anglers to complete their licensing paperwork on a mobile device, infringes his patent.
Claim 1 describes:
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Entering animal harvest data (i.e. how many fish of a certain type you caught) into a computer
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Uploading the harvest data, together with location data, to a second computer (operated by someone else)
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Checking the data against the maximum allowed by the user?s license
In other words, Thompson patented following state laws, and filing the appropriate paperwork, but you know, connected to a powerful computer network. Claim 2 describes the same system, but specifies a mobile device as the first computer and a server as the second.
On January 22, Thompson filed a lawsuit claiming that MyODFW infringes his patent. But he didn?t sue the state or any of its departments?he sued Curt Melcher, the Director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, personally.
Making it Personal
Because of a legal concept called sovereign immunity, you generally can?t sue a state government, or any of its departments, for patent infringement. When I saw the Thompson v. Melcher case as I was going through this year?s first patent lawsuits, it struck me as a possible attempt to do an end-run on sovereign immunity.
I ran this hypothesis by Joshua Landau, patent counsel at Computer Communications & Industry Association, who agreed that it did look like a way to put legal pressure on a state when you can?t sue the state. He pointed me to a 1908 Supreme Court case called Ex parte Young, which suggests just this method to get around sovereign immunity. Plaintiffs can sue a state official who they believe is in violation of a federal law. In this case, because Thompson is barred from arguing that the State of Oregon is violating his patent, he?s saying Melcher personally has contributed to the infringement of his patent.
The Ex parte Young route doesn?t provide a way to get damages, only an injunction, and indeed Thompson doesn?t ask for damages in his lawsuit. If Thompson?s extremely broad claims are valid, in my view, that would basically mean shutting down the MyODFW app.
“It certainly looks like an attempt to put pressure on the state, both through legal expenditures, and by threatening to enjoin a service they provide,” Landau said. “Suing an individual official is a plausible strategy to try to get around state sovereign immunity in some cases, but there are significant open questions.”
Among those questions would be whether or not Melcher has a significant enough connection to the allegedly infringing app. Melcher is a longtime public servant who has served as ODFW?s director since 2015.
Patenting A Government Service Is Pretty Bad
Regardless of who is being sued, Thompson?s patent on e-tagging wildlife is very problematic in and of itself. Most government services aren?t really ?inventions.? So there really shouldn?t be patents on collecting benefits, or getting a certain type of state-granted license, or reporting your taxes. And because of the Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court case, similar ?do it on a computer?-style patents should be banned, as well. We shouldn?t be seeing patents that cover ?requesting benefits plus a powerful computer network? or ?sending your paperwork to the government oh but on a smartphone.?
But we do see them all the time, because it?s a broken system. Patent examiners have, on average, 19 hours to prove applicants like Iiley Thompson should not get a patent.2 Applicants get an unlimited number of do-overs, as long as they can keep paying for them.
Thompson?s patent application was filed in 2015. At that date, it was utterly predictable that government services like hunting licenses would continue to move online, as they already had been for many years.
And it wasn?t just predictable in a general sense?it was specifically predictable that Oregon regulators would move their hunting licenses to smartphones. They were already moving other ODFW services to smartphones, and were being as public about it as possible. By late 2014, about a year before Thompson filed his patent application, the Department linked smartphones to its hunting map. This was reported in The Oregonian, the state?s largest newspaper. By mid-2015, ODFW had come out with a fishing-specific app, which was reported in the Klamath Falls Herald and News.
So it?s hardly shocking that in March 2016, ODFW got started thinking about how they could improve their licensing process. The timeline for Oregon?s creation of electronic licensing is laid out in this ODFW PowerPoint.
Notably, Thompson never actually created his own app, at least not one that?s ever been made publicly available. As his complaint states, ?Thompson has never offered nor sold, and has never authorized nor licensed any other to offer or sell, a system or method covered by the claims of the ?651 patent.?
Thompson runs a footwear business in a town just south of Portland, and has an extensive resume of work in that industry, including stints at Adidas and Nike. I asked Thompson to talk about his case to get his side of it, but he declined an interview. I also emailed the public information office at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, but didn?t hear back.
1 Patent demand letters frequently do not make explicit ?demands,? but rather couch the language in terms of making an ?offer? to license or buy a patent. But, it?s generally understood to be a demand for payment. It puts the recipient officially on notice, which can have other effects, like increasing damages. More examples of demand letters are at trollingeffects.org.
2 Frakes, Michael and Wasserman, Melissa F., The Failed Promise of User Fees: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (December 2014). Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, pp. 602-636, 2014. For something free and more readable, see this 2014 piece in The Washington Post, ?Inside the stressed-out, time-crunched patent examiner workforce.?
Originally posted to the Letters Patent blog.
Filed Under: hunting app, iiley thompson, oregon, oregon department of fish and wildlife, patent
Comments on “How Oregon's Top Wildlife Official Got Sued Over His State's Hunting App”
Feetured apps
Bad patents are a running gag on this site, but I guess it’s one way for this guy to get a leg up on the competition. Hopefully a judge walks this back and tells them not to let the gait hit them on their way out.
Well that's one way to get your 15-minutes of infamy...
Notably, Thompson never actually created his own app, at least not one that’s ever been made publicly available. As his complaint states, “Thompson has never offered nor sold, and has never authorized nor licensed any other to offer or sell, a system or method covered by the claims of the ‘651 patent.”
Or in other words he’s a patent troll, sitting on a patent and suing people who actually create something people use just because it makes use of a similar idea.
Seems to me it would be entirely fitting to attempt to invalidate his patent, as I imagine you can’t patent filing government paperwork and simply tacking on ‘on a computer/smartphone’ should not change that.
their site is linked in the story
and has contact details
There's something scwewy around here!
Elmer Fudd’s head would be spinning right about now….
First off the bat, Thompson approached the State asking for a license fee on his patent – that right there say that he intended to do business with the State, not with one of its employees. When he gets the brush-off, only then does he bring suit against an employee of said State. Not a good omen of things to come.
OK, but insofar as I’m aware, every state (and indeed, every government organizational unit) indemnifies their employees when they are performing their assigned duties. This should be enough to foreclose any suit against a public employee carrying out his public duties. But as we all know, sometimes courts can go all manner of pear-shaped, so take my words with a grain of salt.
And as it happens, the State could do one or more of several things. Presumably Thompson wants the court to order Melcher to have his department to stop using the app, and take steps to prevent its use in the future. All the State has to so is remove this ability (to stop the app’s use) from Melcher’s job description, and place it directly within the purview of either the Governer or the Legislature. Sayonara, Mr. Thompson.
Another thing would be to juggle Melcher’s job assignment such that he’s no longer in charge of the ODFW, someone else is. Back to court for you, Mr. Thompson – wrong name on the complaint.
This is one time where I’d root for the State to give a citizen the run-around. And that’s all before Melcher’s lawyers get serious and start proceedings to have the patent tossed as invalid, for reasons described in the article.
Re: There's something scwewy around here!
No, that does not bar suits against individual public employees. See Ex Parte: Edward T. Young, 209 U.S. 123 (US 1908). Mr. Young’s legal bills may have been picked up by the state, but suit was against him and imprisonment for contempt was to be against him personally, not against the State of Minnesota.
Why do I feel like it wouldn’t take me 19 minutes, let alone 19 hours, to make a decision on this patent? There would have to be some SUPREME level of laziness going on for it to take so long to toss this nonsense.