Popular developer and Steam Deck creator Valve emerges victorious in a lawsuit that could have major implications moving forward.
Earlier this week, the district court of the Western District of Washington favoured Valve Corporation in its 2023 lawsuit against Leigh Rothschild and his associated companies, on all counts, including breach of contract and the violation of Washington’s Patent Troll Prevention and Consumer Protection Acts.
Rothschild is an inventor with a huge array of patents to his name, granted and pended, covering an extremely broad range of fields. He also owns or leads a host of companies that manage the business side of patents. In this particular legal case, Valve alleged that Rothschild himself, Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems LLC, Display Technologies LLC, Patent Asset Management LLC, Meyler Legal LLC, and Samuel Meyler were guilty of “bad-faith assertions of patent infringement”, amongst other things.
The patent in question is US8856221B2, a ‘system and method for storing broadcast content in a cloud-based computing environment’. Rothschild Broadcast Distribution Systems (RBDS) owns the rights to that patent, and in 2016, Valve obtained a “perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license” for it and others in Rothschild’s portfolio.
Your call, OP, but it might be worth linking to the PC Gamer article that this GameRant article parasitizes and faintly credits as their lone source at the end. (“Valve wins lawsuit against Rothschild and associated entities, with a jury agreeing they violated an anti-patent troll protection act”)
There’s no telephone game.
The original author gets the credit.
GameRant’s interface is obnoxious.
GameRant is a content farm of dubious reliability. In Wikiproject Video Games on Wikipedia, we try not to use them in favor of other sources where possible.
Giving GameRant clicks helps them on their race to the bottom – dragging everyone else along.
“This decision could encourage more legal reforms and influence the strategies employed by law firms and corporations in handling patent disputes. As the legal community and the tech industry continue to navigate these challenges, the ruling in favor of Valve provides a noteworthy reference point in the evolving discourse on patent law.”
That’s 161 words straight of unadulterated “oh fuck, the deadline is in ten minutes and I haven’t reached the word count.”
Welcome to life today. Less time than you take to discredit this can copy/paste the search terms yourself and choose, but no, you’re taking the extra time for disparaging OP and sources. Looks pretty defensive and makes me wonder about your investment.
When is it a bad thing to encourage best practices on the Internet to verify sources and recognize signs of LLM slop? They took the time to explain why it’s better to get a direct source and avoid middlemen. That’s not “defensive”.
Your argument is that they simply could have searched for additional sources, but I think you’ve proven the point that simply searching without verifying is likely to yield garbage.
There’s no disparaging OP here unless they are the author of the article. But I believe that the article is being properly criticized for the things it does wrong.
Less time than you take to discredit this can copy/paste the search terms yourself and choose
What the fuck are you even talking about? I provided the PC Gamer source because I personally have no trouble finding good sources but know some people do (nor should people have to go look for them in lieu of a content farm anyway), and the GameRant article linked in the OP credits PC Gamer as its singular source. I broke down why it’s preferable after reading both sources.
I don’t feel like being lectured on going out and finding better sources when 1) I did and 2) the lobotomist would’ve had to accidentally leave the ice pick in your head for you to be fucking stupid enough to find and present the LLM slop that you did. It’s pathetically clear you have no idea how to find good sources of information, and you should work on basic media literacy skills. (That’s a rude but real suggestion. If you want polite, you can start next time by not suggesting I have sinister ulterior motives for trying to help.)
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Your call, OP, but it might be worth linking to the PC Gamer article that this GameRant article parasitizes and faintly credits as their lone source at the end. (“Valve wins lawsuit against Rothschild and associated entities, with a jury agreeing they violated an anti-patent troll protection act”)
Edit: Rad.
Good call I changed the article from GameRant to the PCGamer article you linked
https://legalnewsfeed.com/2026/02/17/seattle-jury-rules-against-prominent-patent-holder-in-landmark-anti-trolling-case/
Edit: searched Valve Rothschild lawsuit
This is transparently LLM-generated.
“This decision could encourage more legal reforms and influence the strategies employed by law firms and corporations in handling patent disputes. As the legal community and the tech industry continue to navigate these challenges, the ruling in favor of Valve provides a noteworthy reference point in the evolving discourse on patent law.”
That’s 161 words straight of unadulterated “oh fuck, the deadline is in ten minutes and I haven’t reached the word count.”
Welcome to life today. Less time than you take to discredit this can copy/paste the search terms yourself and choose, but no, you’re taking the extra time for disparaging OP and sources. Looks pretty defensive and makes me wonder about your investment.
When is it a bad thing to encourage best practices on the Internet to verify sources and recognize signs of LLM slop? They took the time to explain why it’s better to get a direct source and avoid middlemen. That’s not “defensive”.
Your argument is that they simply could have searched for additional sources, but I think you’ve proven the point that simply searching without verifying is likely to yield garbage.
There’s no disparaging OP here unless they are the author of the article. But I believe that the article is being properly criticized for the things it does wrong.
What the fuck are you even talking about? I provided the PC Gamer source because I personally have no trouble finding good sources but know some people do (nor should people have to go look for them in lieu of a content farm anyway), and the GameRant article linked in the OP credits PC Gamer as its singular source. I broke down why it’s preferable after reading both sources.
I don’t feel like being lectured on going out and finding better sources when 1) I did and 2) the lobotomist would’ve had to accidentally leave the ice pick in your head for you to be fucking stupid enough to find and present the LLM slop that you did. It’s pathetically clear you have no idea how to find good sources of information, and you should work on basic media literacy skills. (That’s a rude but real suggestion. If you want polite, you can start next time by not suggesting I have sinister ulterior motives for trying to help.)