If you are one of the many people in the document imaging industry who has unwillingly donated to Dr. Mitch Medina’s Kenyan missions, you shouldn’t feel alone. According to a recent report by the group PatentFreedom, Millennium has been one of the busiest non-practicing entities (NPEs) pursuing patent suits over the past five years. In total Millennium has sued 110 companies with more than 90% coming since 2003.
Millennium, as many of you know, has some patents that seem to be related to automated forms processing. Although there has been a lot of talk about trying to stop them, eventually everyone seems to settle because the terms are made so agreeable. And Medina, who is apparently back in good standing with the Kenyan government after being exiled a couple years ago, marches on. For 2009, I found suits filed suit against SpringCM, A2iA, and eCopy.
Part of the settlement used to be that the defendant couldn’t talk about it and had to name some competitors or other vendors to go after. Don’t know if that’s still the case, but, after a big year in 2005, Millennium seems to have settled down to going after a handful of companies per year. Not all its suits involved imaging, as according to the site “Patent Prospector,” Medina has 17 U.S. patents, including one for retrieving dog poop (5,403,050). How apropos.”
Ralph
