Company that loves to sue sues Boston University for using a link-shortening service

A company that claims it has a patent on the idea of linking a number entered in an online box to a specific article has set its sights on Boston University, claiming the school's use of a link shortener is outrageous and deserving of punishment - or a large enough settlement to make the case go away.

In a suit filed today in US District Court in Boston, Internet Media Interactive Corp. of Wilmington, DE alleges that BU's use of a system in which readers of some of its online pages are directed to a Web page where they can type in a numerical code to access a specific article violates a patent the company owns - and which expired in 2016.

The company says it's seeking a declaration that BU was in the wrong and the awarding of "reasonable" royalties on BU's practice, plus whatever damages would make BU think twice about ever doing such a bad thing again.

The company has sued everybody from Barnes & Noble to the Bunn-o-Matic Corp. (which churns out coffee makers, not robot rabbits) - 85 companies and non-profit groups since 2012. The BU complaint appears to have used a fill-in-the-blanks template, because it states:

Internet Media has the exclusive right to enforce and collect all past damages for infringement of the ‘835 Patent for the period starting six years prior to the filing date of this suit (October 29, 2015) through the expiration date of the ‘835 Patent (August 30, 2016).

This would not be the first case where the company basically recycled a suit against one party against another. Last year, a judge overseeing the case the company brought (and then dropped) against Shopify, Inc., wrote:

The Court is certainly troubled by the apparent lack of effort expended by Plaintiff in putting together a respectable pleading in this case. Recycling old complaints without bothering to give a careful review to remove information unrelated to the current defendant is not an appropriate way to litigate.

Ed. note: If "prior art" means anything, in the mid-1990s, as editor of a trade-publication Web site, I helped create a system that let visitors type a number into a box to jump to a specific article - several years before the Patent Office granted the patent at question in the suit. We used it through at least the first couple of years of the new millennium. We never thought to try to patent it because it seemed like such an obvious idea.

And a conflict of interest note: The kidlet is currently a student in a graduate program at BU, although I have not consulted with anybody at BU about this article.