the worst man in tech

Key Takeaways

there exists a man named Brooks borer who has made it his life goal to never work a day in his life and somehow make millions of dollars an actual parasite now how would someone make millions of dollars without actually doing any work patents you may not be familiar with the documentary about software engineering called the Silicon Valley which in season 4 episode 7 the patent troll a company uses its patents to legally extort money from Richard Hendrick CEO but through some Scooby-Doo level meddling Richard is able to save his company from the patent trolls now Mr borers is a real life incarnation of this episode he is a patent troll in fact he has strong armed Cisco and Juniper Networks into paying him many many dollars you better hold on to your flabber cuz it's about to get gasted but before we can do that we're going to have to do a little bit of scene work okay I'm going to have to tell you a little bit about our boy Mr Brooks borers in 2006 Mr built like a bag of milk borers acquired his stockpile of patents no not by being talented not by creating Innovation not by making everyday life better for the average American no no no no no he got them by just purchasing the patents from now defunct company caspan networks and he has been using his arsenal of Hardware patents to hold down the entire industry singlehandedly he does this by suing any network adjacent company without without even doing any research you can only play this trump card so many times and you can only fly just so close to the Sun now some of you are probably a bit unfamiliar about how does one make money off of patents and this kind of patent trolling it's pretty simple patent trolls like this adult shaped Manchild Mr borers go to a company and say hey if you don't give us some large amount of money we're going to take you to court over Paton infringement of course companies don't want to have to spend years in court just at a shot to attemp to prove that they in fact did not violate and if they do not prove that they did not violate these patents they could be held liable for significantly more amount of Damages so often these companies opt into which is quite reasonable an outof Court settlement in which they pay a hefty amount of dollars but not nearly the same amount of dollars in time effort or potential losses as going to court so in 2021 Mr borers felt like he needed one more ride of that pony one more proverbial squeeze of the lemon and he put cloud flare in his sites claiming 100 violations of four separate patents with damages totaling 25 million to 94 million he actually thought he could get away with this the hubris of this man he actually thought Cloud Flair would be like well Mr borers I mean he got the patents and we got the millions so here you go now Cloud Flair didn't just take Mr borers or Sable IP his company to court oh no no no they humiliated him and legally dis dismantled Sable IP and the whole world got to watch this happen when Mr Borchers took the stand I mean that's your business let's don't beat around the bush you're in the business of filing lawsuits true yes and you would agree with me that you've been in the business for a while right yes Mr borers just agreed that it's his business to sue people but even though this is super scummy he's a patent troll it's his life's work to use other people's life's work to strong arm companies into paying him money but the cloud flare attorneys just were not satisfied oh no no no they just spent 3 years in legal battles and as my mom says it's time to put the old TCP packet in the coffin she's she said that you agree that let's leave the ethical out of it because they say ethical and responsible you believe it would be responsible reasonable business practice to sit down and talk to folks before you sue them right yes you didn't do that here did you sir no and you don't do that as your practice right that's correct you just told this jury not 20 minutes ago that you sue every time you don't talk to anybody that's what you told them fair fair this is a Savage takedown of Mr borers and he has to admit that he doesn't do anything in good faith he is just out there to sue companies and take their money now this would have been a perfect ending to the shenanigans of Mr Brooks borcher but it turns out there's a little bit more a little bit more to this deserved a little bit of cherry on top of the disaster enter Steven Dell now Steven Dell is sable IP's expert in Damages and I of course throw up the old scare quotes on that expert and that's because when Steph took the stand and explained his highly intricate system of assessing damages which I'm quite certain involves him shaking up a hat full of little paper and pulling out two numbers and being like here's my range 25 to 9 94 even the judge the honorable Judge had to step in and claim he was very skeptical of Mr Dell's opinion he judg expained that he was very concerned that there's no support for his methodology your whole job Steven is to assess damages and to make it believable and even the judge just called BS on you this is not even the jury this is the judge in the end it only took about a cup of coffee time to deliberate that Sable IP in fact did not have any claim and in fact Sable IP owed Cloud flare money Sable IP ended up having to pay $225,000 to cloudflare which if you're hearing that you're probably thinking three years of litigation and all I got was $225,000 it's kind of peanuts in comparison to the expense of that but that's not the real win the real win is that Sable IP had to take all of their patents and make them public they're no longer able to feain Giant losses be able to pursue more companies and be able to stifle Innovation anymore and miss Mr borers your days with networking came to an end now I'm sure Mr borers and expert Steven will sleep great knowing that they have several other companies each with several other patents in which they will continue to terrorize Innovation and make sure that nobody can grow without them getting a little free piece of that pie but it does feel pretty dang satisfying knowing that Justice was served