Days later, she found out it wasn’t a scam—a man knocked at her door, and she was served. Taylor and her husband didn’t even have the $10,000 retainer that would be needed to hire a lawyer to do the initial paperwork, much less the hundreds of thousands it costs to challenge a patent in court.
“I knew we weren’t infringing and it was a junk patent,” said Taylor. “I would just lay there at night, not really sleeping. You could lose everything, and what do you do? It’s quite frightening.”
She found a lawyer who would take smaller payments to file extensions and negotiate on her behalf. But she knew that could only go on for so long. “Garfum was expecting us to pay up with money I didn’t have and I couldn’t keep dipping into our personal savings meant for monthly house bills,” she said in a post on BytePhoto explaining her predicament to users.
In the interview, Taylor said Garfum’s lawyer was seeking a “really high amount,” which would be impossible for her to pay. As the process went on, Taylor realized she didn’t want to make even a token payment for such an obviously unfair patent.
“Even if we were only going to pay $500, I was still outraged,” she said. “All that meant is I would be buying in to this whole mess. I kept thinking, ‘If I let this happen, there are others after me who are going to be sued. Some of them could be websites run by my friends. I couldn’t let that happen.’”
Fighting a “patent bully”
Late-night Google searches ultimately led her to the EFF, which decided to take her case pro bono. The EFF has long done legal advocacy to reform the patent system and fight individual patents, but representing a patent defendant directly—a potentially very expensive endeavor—is a first for the group. It’s partnering with SF-based law firm Durie Tangri to represent Taylor.