Some patent trolls hide in the shadows, avoiding reporters and setting up complex mazes of shell companies to avoid scrutiny. James Logan, the owner of Personal Audio LLC, isn't like that.

His company got a little blip of publicity back in 2011, when it won an $8 million jury verdict against Apple. But it became truly infamous earlier this year when it started telling podcasters that they had to pay up for a license to its patents. But Logan didn't back down from telling his story. When NPR's This American Life and Planet Money ran more stories about patent trolls this summer, they featured an interview with Logan in which he defended his practice. Then Logan even went "into the lion's den," fielding a question-and-answer session at Slashdot. Logan had a business sending people audio tapes by mail back in the 1990s, which he says gave him critical intellectual property rights that justify his request for money from podcasters.

Even though Logan and Personal Audio's patents have been targeted by EFF, right now, its licensing machine seems to be rolling forward. Today the company announced that SanDisk is now a licensee to its patent portfolio. In all, Personal Audio has licensed "somewhere between one-third and two-thirds" of all MP3 audio players, the company's licensing chief Richard Baker told Ars. Personal Audio has also licensed audio devices made by Motorola, Blackberry, LG, HTC, Samsung, and Amazon to the patents.

SanDisk is not a big player in the MP3 market, especially compared to giants like Samsung and Apple. Back in 2010, one analyst estimated the Sansa MP3 player added only 2 percent to SanDisk's bottom line.

Personal Audio claims it has patents that cover the way playlists are organized and navigated, in addition to the "episodic content" patent it says is infringed by podcasters. It's those playlist-related patents, numbers 6,199,076 and 7,509,178, that were allegedly infringed by Samsung. The same patents were used to sue Apple. Baker couldn't comment on the Apple case except to say it was "resolved" after Apple filed an appeal. Presumably, that resulted in some kind of settlement and a payment to Personal Audio.

Even do-nothing patent-holders are doing "R&D"

Logan's patents are actually a kind of "research and development" for the digital audio industry, explained Baker. "The whole idea of a patent is, you make this invention, you explain how to do it, and you publish it to the world in exchange for 20 years of exclusivity on that subject."

Baker said that Logan made significant disclosures to the public in his patents and invested close to $2 million of his own money in a business that ultimately did not succeed.

When I asked Baker if he truly believed that without James Logan's cassettes-by-mail business there would be no MP3 players, he didn't shy away from saying Logan did indeed have an impact. "They may have been later to develop, or they may have come out differently," said Baker. "Apple may not have been as successful as they were. They would have had to make some of the mistakes that Jim Logan did in his product."

Jim Logan's business gave others the opportunity to learn from his mistakes, said Baker. "Working in the industry, you understand how technology works and how everyone learns from everyone else."

The Personal Audio lawsuit that is furthest along is its case against CBS, NBC, HowStuffWorks, and TogiNet. It's scheduled for trial in 2014. TogiNet, the least-known defendant in that group, is based in Tyler, Texas. It seems likely that the company was added to Personal Audio's litigation to maintain venue in the Eastern District of Texas.

In May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had a successful fund-raiser to fight Personal Audio's podcasting patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office. "We're preparing a petition challenging the so-called 'podcast' patent and will be filing it soon," said EFF attorney Daniel Nazer.