Lawsuits against Companies as Positive & Negative Relationships
After learning the concepts of structural balance and positive/negative relationships, I became interested in how we could apply this knowledge into the real world. As an intern at a law firm this past summer, I realized that there could be some connection to several lawsuits containing structural balance between companies. Two articles I found interesting were “Apparent patent troll targets Lenovo, competitors with lawsuits” and “Lenovo targeted by apparent patent troll in suit.” Although the two seem to focus on Lenovo specifically, they also mention several large companies being sued by smaller companies. In the first article, the writer discusses a Texas-based firm CellTran filing patent infringement lawsuit and complaints against smartphone maker giants. The article mentions Lenovo, Huawei Device Co., Razer USA, ASUSTek Computer Inc., and LG Electronics being victimized of CellTran, a company with little transparency, monetizing patents. Similarly, the second article points the apparent patent troll by Mariner IC, also based on Texas. According to a federal court database, the small company sued several tech firms. “On Tuesday, Mariner IC filed separate lawsuits against Lenovo, Huawei Device USA and TiVo Corporation. On March 13, the firm filed separate suits against Sharp Corporation, AsusTek Computer, Acer Inc, Schneider Electric USA and Bose Corporation” (Ohnesorge). The Texan company also seems to have a muddled background sharing the same mailing address with Quest Patent Research Corporatoin, an intellectual property asses management entity (Ohnesorge).
Because structural balance is only applied to complete graphs, we are only considering Lenovo, Huawei, and ASUSTek Computer Inc. as the tech giants, which are all mentioned in both articles. And although Lenovo and Huawei Devices are often seen as competitors, we are going to ignore this relationship and instead define a positive relationship as parties being sued and Mariner and CellTran as parties suing. Drawing from the first article, we could define the relationships between CellTran and the tech giants as negative and the relationships between the tech giants as positive. Following the same rule, the relationships between the tech giants are positive while the relationships between Mariner IC and each tech giant as negative. We could also draw a line between CellTran and Mariner because they are both suing other companies and also patent trolling them. The final graph of the combination of two articles follow the structural balance property because for each triangle nodes of the two bigger companies and smaller company, there is exactly one negative relationship and two positive relationships, and for each triangle nodes of three big companies, there are three positive relationships. Thus, the structural balance property is followed, and according to the balance theorem, the nodes could be separated into two groups (enemies/parties suing and friends/parties being sued). The complete graph represents the possible structure of other lawsuits to see the patterns of these patent trolls as well as other types of lawsuits.
While the non-overlapping companies in the two articles were not used in the graphs, they could be used in another network graph to predict the possibilities of a company suing a larger one for patent trolling. In addition, strong and weak ties could also be used to represent the similarities of each company and if there are any patterns of each party. Of course, the graph presents limited information on the differences of each lawsuit as well as the specific details, but they can help detect the patterns that arise from the patent lawsuits as well as the legitimacy of them. From the second article, we see that these lawsuits can be costly for tech giants. “Lenovo competitor Apple, for example, was ordered this month to pay patent troll VirnetX Holding Corp. $502.6 million in damages over claims that it infringed on four patents to power iMessage, FaceTime and other secure communications products” (Ohnesorge). Therefore, by tracing and connecting different companies to each other from several cases, companies might be able to protect or prepare better from smaller companies trying to take advantage.
Sources:
- “Apparent patent troll targets Lenovo, competitors with lawsuits” by Lauren K. Ohnesorge: https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2018/09/07/apparent-patent-troll-targets-lenovo-competitors.html
- “Lenovo targeted by apparent patent troll in suit” by Lauren K. Ohnesorge: https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2018/04/26/lenovo-targeted-by-apparentpatent-troll-in-suit.html