Who?

Right.

Taurus is the Wisconsin affiliate of Texas-based Plutus IP LLC.

Who?

Right again, because they don’t make anything but lawsuits.

CNNMoney sums them up beautifully:

The group’s very name — Plutus is the mythical Greek god of wealth — evokes the riches that are stake in a business that wrings revenue from patent portfolios via licensing deals and settlements, usually achieved by threatening or filing lawsuits.

Here’s the way it works: A law firm buys up unused patents on the cheap, sits on them until somebody makes something similar, sues them, settles for a million or so, goes on to the next litigation. Nice little racket, huh?

Often these patents are arguably "low-quality" or "obvious" and as such, won’t hold up in court, but large companies, such as the four mentioned above are willing to settle for a small amount to save on legal costs.

The suit comes at an interesting time as the House of Representatives is expected to vote soon on the Patent Reform Act, proposed to address overly-litigious patent farmers.

Interestingly, most of the lawsuits are filed in patent-suit friendly, Marshall, Texas, says the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which counts Google, eBay, and Microsoft among its members.

According to the website:

The number of companies caught up in patent litigation is large and growing: for example, the 218 infringement actions filed in Marshall, Texas, during the 28 months from January 2004 through April 2006 named 856 defendants, including more than 600 separate companies (some companies were named in more than one action).

Earlier this week, Google expressed why patent reform was important on its Public Policy blog:

Low-quality patents and escalating legal costs are currently hurting the ability of U.S. companies to compete globally, and that in turn hurts U.S. workers and consumers. Without a modernized patent system, U.S. companies are at a competitive disadvantage, spending resources on unnecessary litigation and unwarranted licensing instead of on innovation.

The Google Public Policy blog noted how Google supports patent reform legislation before Congress. Google is one of the numerous big tech names backing the Coalition for Patent Fairness and its position on patent reform.

Google’s public policy blog posts have been a fascinating read since the blog debuted. This time it isn’t just the post that catches our interest.

A response by Ben Klemens, guest scholar at The Brookings Institution, asked Google to clarify its stance on patents, namely those in the contentious world of technology:

I can’t tell from your public statement here whether you in the public policy department support or do not support software patents per se, though I would bet you a dollar that if you surveyed your employees, the great majority would call software and business method patents an impediment.

Why is Google supporting this tepid bill? Have you determined that it’s time your engineers revise their ethical beliefs regarding mathematical algorithms? Or is a bill that would address subject matter problems just too unlikely to work?

Google may be trying to have its cake and eat it too, to quote the ancient clich