Troll Busters LLC

Troll Busters LLC is a private Washington limited liability company registered in 2007 and based at 8339 SE 57th Street, Mercer Island, Washington. State registry records list Jeff Oster as registered agent and member; there is no public ticker and no publicly reported employee or revenue figures. Press and legal-trade coverage describes it as a small, one-person operation run by Oster. It is not an operating manufacturer or service provider.

Operations. Troll Busters does not sell products. It describes its work as challenging "over-broad patent rights used for extortion and 'troll-like' demands," and it pursues that through two vehicles: third-party patent reexamination requests at the USPTO and false-marking litigation. Reported filings include an inter partes reexamination of Symyx's U.S. Patent 6,869,779 (control 95/001,045) and ex parte requests against Applied Biosystems' 6,814,934 and Life Technologies' 5,928,907 (90/012,341, filed June 2012, a 356-page request). In the Symyx proceeding the PTO vacated the filing date after finding Troll Busters had not adequately identified the real party in interest, an issue that drew practitioner commentary.

Patent-litigation posture. The tracked data show 1 case, 1 as plaintiff and 0 as defendant — consistent with an entity that initiates challenges rather than one defending products. Its single tracked suit is a qui tam false-marking action under 35 U.S.C. § 292 rather than a conventional infringement claim; it asserted no patent of its own, alleging instead that defendants marked products with expired patents. Venue was the Southern District of California (Judge Irma E. Gonzalez), not the Eastern District of Texas.

Notable case. Troll Busters LLC v. Roche Diagnostics GmbH et al., No. 3:11-cv-00056 (S.D. Cal., filed Jan. 10, 2011), named Roche Diagnostics, Roche Molecular Systems, Life Technologies, Qiagen, Thermo Fisher, Integrated DNA Technologies, Eurogentec and others, and alleged false marking of 22 expired PCR-related patents on Taq reagents and real-time PCR kits. The court granted motions to dismiss the amended complaint without prejudice on Aug. 31, 2011, and the case was voluntarily dismissed in October 2011. Commentators, including the False Patent Marking blog, characterized Troll Busters itself as a "marking troll" — a label the company disputes.