May 30, 2012- On May 23, 2012, District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap granted plaintiff’s motion in limine to preclude defendant’s counsel from referring to plaintiff using “derogatory terms” for non-practicing entities in a long running patent dispute between patent holder, SSL Services [NPE] and Citrix. SSL filed suit against Citrix more than four years ago asserting three patents (6,061,796, 6,158,011, and 6,907,530) related to virtual private networks. (The ’530 patent was subsequently dropped from the case). In the May 23rd order, Gilstrap wrote, “[Defendant] shall not refer to [plaintiff]using derogatory terms including but not limited to ‘paper patent,’ ‘shell corporation,’ ‘patent troll,’ ‘pirates,’ ‘playing the lawsuit lottery,’ and ‘corporate shell game,’ or any similar derogatory terms to identify [plaintiff], [plaintiff’s] patents in suit, or companies comparable to [plaintiff]. However, [defendant] shall be permitted to refer to [plaintiff] by the term ‘non-practicing entity’ or ‘non-practicing plaintiff.’ SSL acquired the patents in 2005. The patents originated with V-One and were assigned to SSL by AEP Networks. In a Markman ruling in September 2011, Judge T. John Ward ruled that that the preambles of the asserted claims were limiting to the asserted claims of the in-suit patents because the, “body of the claims rely on the preamble to provide proper antecedent basis for terms appearing in the body of the claims, as well the context in which the claimed invention is implemented. In other words, the preambles provide more than a stated purpose or intended use for the invention.”  SSL Systems has not filed any other patent suits to date.  (SSL Services, LLC v. Citrix Systems, Inc. et al 2-08-cv-00158)