U mad? (Photo: Wikipedia)

Oh good, the patent trolls are at it again.

There’s something remarkably sinister about shell companies whose raison d’être is to mess with people actually working to innovate and build cool things. Silver State Intellectual Technologies, a shell company based in Las Vegas, is no exception. Now it’s taking its own brand of assholery to one of New York’s most adored startups: Foursquare.

GigaOm reports that Silver State claims to own the patent for GPS information technology, and is subsequently suing Foursquare for, like most modern internet companies, using GPS?

Writes GigaOm:

In a complaint filed Wednesday in Las Vegas, Silver State Intellectual Technologies Inc asked for an injunction and damages related to U.S .Patent 7475057 (“System and method for user navigation”) and U.S. Patent 7343165 (“GPS Publication Application Server”)….Silver State’s short legal filing (embedded below) doesn’t describe how exactly Foursquare infringed on the patent.

Luckily, most suits of these kind settle out of court, ending with the sued company paying a fee to license the patented technology. Hopefully with the freshly launched sponsored updates, Foursquare will have some spare cash to throw at the problem.

Jessica Roy is a reporter for Betabeat and the New York Observer. Follow Jessica on Twitter or via RSS. jroy@observer.com