Troll Tracker

The Case

Patent Trolls, a somewhat pejorative term for patent holding companies or non-practicing entities, exist primarily to engage in litigation with large companies that may infringe on patents they own. Their business operations are minimal, and often only consist of a website containing news about their inventions and patents. One law firm client was defending a case against a patent troll who, throughout the duration of the case, made slight changes to their website to make it appear as if their patent portfolio was changing to the benefit of the case. The client wanted to see what changes were being made and when, but was unable to continually access the site for fear of being noticed.

The Solution

We had already developed a very robust web and wiki crawler because the available options were not sufficient for our needs. It was a question of utilizing our web crawler technology paired with some smart scheduling and reporting. We could run the crawler as often as needed, but we found that running it daily was sufficient. Each day, the crawler would go through each page on the target website and download dated copies of any pages that had changed since the last download.

Once the pages were downloaded, we placed them in an easily accessible web interface so that our client could click through the history of a page and see exactly what was added or removed and when.

The historical data could then be used as collected evidence, completely documented with logs showing when and how the site was accessed.