Medina has filed at least 60 patent infringement suits in the past several years. The strategy is to skim a modest licensing fee, as low as $25,000, enough to make a defendant swallow and write a check rather than fight in court.

JetBlue Airways is on Medina's hotplate at the moment, being sued for infringing 6,683,697, which claims extracting form field information from a scanned form. Eon-Net, a Cayman Islands shell for Medina, alleges JetBlue is infringing for collecting customer information over the Internet. Miss the non-sequitur and you may be qualified to be a God-fearing delusional for Medina's ministry.

CoolAnimalStuff.com is another victim. Richard Samuel, attorney for CoolAnimalStuff.com, laid it out in court documents filed May 2005: "Eon-Net's attempt to settle numerous cases immediately and for nominal amounts is clearly indicative of Eon-Net's business plan and strategy - namely, to quickly profit by betting that individual defendants will choose settlement over the more expensive option of defending a meritless lawsuit."

Medina hails from New Jersey, home of the welcoming slogan "forgetaboutit," and the setting for the popular TV series with loving empathetic characters, The Sopranos.

Medina's practice, while unusual, is hardly novel; otherwise there'd be a patent on it. PhoneTel is another company with the same patent "marketing" technique as Medina; proudly proclaiming "the patent represents the collaboration of the law with technology and serves as a catalyst for economic achievement." Economic achievement indeed.