MARSHALL, Texas — Seven adult entertainment companies offering web content were sued Friday by a technology company that claims each violated its patent for pop-under advertisements on their websites.
ExitExchange Corp. claims in its suits that it found evidence of patent infringement over U.S. Patent No. 7,353,229 on Slutload.com (operated or hosted by Core Marine Holdings Ltd.), AdultFriendFinder (FriendFinder Networks Inc.), VPorn.com (Lemuria Communications Inc.), VideoSexArchive.com (WZ Communications Inc.), Porn.com (Reflected Network), Motherless.com (NTT America Inc.) and Tube8.com and PornHub.com (Manwin USA Inc.).
Two other suits against hotel services Travelocity and Kayak Software Corp. also were filed.
U.S. Patent No. 7,353,229 covers systems and methods for providing ads that open behind a browser window, known as pop-under advertising. Pop-unders are partially obscured by the web browser at the time that it is opened.
With the patent, "a viewer initiates a load triggering event and in response, a post-session platform is opened to display a post-session display in the background of the media. Significantly, in the preferred embodiment, the post-session platform stays in said background until a view triggering event occurs."
ExitExchange, according to its website, says it has the largest U.S. and worldwide reach for the pop-under segment with a membership base of more than 100,000 websites. The company has offices in Vancouver, Wash., and Logview, Texas.
In each of the nine lawsuits filed Friday, ExitExchange said the companies have infringed on the patent, and unless enjoined, will continue to do so.
The company seeks unspecified damages, as well as injunctions, against the companies in Texas federal court in Marshall.
The federal court in Marshall is a popular one for patent lawsuits. Attorneys say that quick trials and plaintiff-friendly juries are the big draw there. So are the Texas-sized verdicts sometimes handed to winners.
Patent cases are heard faster in Marshall than in many other courts, forcing some defendants to buckle under the pressure of time when trying to sort out complex infringement cases.
And while only about five percent make it to trial in Marshall, patent holders win 78 percent of the time, compared with an average of 59 percent nationwide, according to LegalMetric, a company that tracks patent litigation.