Patent trolls that make money by aggressively filing intellectual property lawsuits are nothing new, but Ars Technica has chronicled a particularly ugly iteration: companies that try to shake down small businesses for using basic technologies like scanners. Project Paperless and a number of shell companies affiliated with it have claimed that they’re owed thousands of dollars from end users who “hook up a scanner and email a PDF document,” attempting to spook them into settlements.
How scanner scammers charge small businesses a fortune for the right to email PDFs
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
While Project Paperless has backed down from pitched legal battles, it’s difficult to fight trolls who go after a large number of users rather than the companies who make the allegedly infringing devices — a move that’s quite deliberate. “If they extract a small amount from each possible end user,” says one litigator, “the total amount might well end up being a much larger sum than they could ever get from the manufacturers.”
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