The small Dallas, Texas firm TQP technically has two employees. One is Michael Jones, whose job there largely consists of having filed a 1989 patent application for an ?Encrypted Data Transmission System Employing Means For Altering The Encryption Keys.?

The second staffer is TQP?s owner, Erich Spangenberg, a lawyer who bought Jones? patent, and for the last four years has used it to sue every technology, banking, and web commerce company in sight.

Since 2008, Spangenberg and his company TQP have launched suits against hundreds of firms, claiming that their use of a common cryptographic protocol in the HTTPS-encrypted portions of their web properties violates the patent invented by Jones and acquired by TQP in 2006. So far Spangenberg?s targets have included Apple, Google, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, every major bank and credit card company, and scores of web startups and online retailers, practically anyone who encrypts pages of a web sites to protect users? privacy. And while most of those lawsuits are ongoing, many companies have already settled with TQP rather than take the case to trial, including Apple, Amazon, Dell, and Exxon Mobil.

?When the government grants you the right to a patent, they grant you the right to exclude others from using it,? Spangenberg says simply when I reach by phone him in his Dallas office. He makes no apology for the fact that TQP doesn?t use the encryption patent itself, or even have a website. ?If you buy a hundred-foot lot in the middle of Manhattan, you?re not required to develop it?Companies have the right to protect their IP dollars.?
Heath Reviewed by Heath on . Meet The Texas Lawyer Suing Hundreds Of Companies For Using Basic Web Encryption http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/11/09/meet-the-texas-lawyer-suing-hundreds-of-companies-for-using-basic-web-encryption/ http://blogs-images.forbes.com/andygreenberg/files/2012/11/spangenberg.jpg Rating: 5