I've had a similar experience with a company called 'Acacia', they claimed to have some broad ranging patent wrt to audio and video over the internet. I told them to either sue or get lost and never heard from them again. It probably helped a lot that I'm based in europe.<p>I have absolutely no respect for companies that use software patents as a way to either control their competition or, as seems to be the case here to use it to effect a take-over.<p>It's a pity these jerks aren't named because it would be quite neat to give them as much bad press as they could handle. Cowards.
Believe me, I'd love to give these guys bad press--TechCrunch or Gawker could do a nice story at their expense. But that's my friend's decision to make, not mine. The last thing I want to do is undermine his defense.
My husband's company invited their IP lawyer to give a talk on software patents a few years ago. He compared them to the English enclosure movement of the 16-17th centures - no one really believes they're protecting innovation so much as providing a way for the established companies to declare their territory and ward off upstarts.<p>Of course, it didn't stop him from recommending that they look for patentable aspects of their software. The other benefit to holding patents is that the best way to prevent an infringement suit is to have the ability to counter-sue based on your own patent collection.
I think it's interesting that everyone is assuming it's a bad software patent. Here's the chain of reasoning I see again and again, and I don't buy it:<p>1. Some software patents are vague, overbroad, or not novel.
2. This is a software patent.
3. This patent is vague, overbroad or not novel.<p>It doesn't logically hold up. You may want to argue that we shouldn't have software patents as a matter of principle, but pointing to examples of bad patents doesn't prove this. The guidepost for me is RSA. To me, if you have patents, then RSA should be patentable. It was novel, it was useful, and the fact that it could be implemented in software doesn't change that.<p>This being about <i>software</i> patents is coincidental. This same story could be told by a tool manufacturer, or an MP3 manufacturer, or anyone else. The real issues are whether the patent is valid, whether they are infringing, and then, if we find that we don't like the consequences when all is played out, figure out where the breakdown between what is really good for innovation and what is actually happening is.<p>If you want to say no software patents, then someone needs to come up with a strong argument why a new way to build an amplifier that improves sound quality should be patentable, but a new way to compress audio files that improves sound quality should not be.<p>There's a lot that could be done with patent reform to make things better, but doing away with software patents is orthogonal to this.<p>Business practice patents are a different story. Most of them don't patent a "how to do X", they patent a "wouldn't it be cool if we did X". My example is that Amazon One-click was trivial to implement. There was no "how". The proof of this is that B&N worked around it by going back in and adding a second click. You couldn't work around a good patent in this kind of way.
We've had the same thing happen to us, though in our case there was no attempt to negotiate beforehand or to buy us out: we found out we were being sued when the other company issued a press release about it. Classy. They're just trying to put us out of business through a combination of lawyer fees and scaring off potential customers. Thankfully, it's not working.<p>It's amazing how many resources lawyers suck up, and how long patent lawsuits last (we were sued in December 2007, and we're still nowhere near trial). It's easily the sort of thing that can cost millions of dollars to fight, which is obviously the sort of expense that can put a startup out of business.<p>However, I'm not too hopeful anything will get done about it any time soon: it seemed from the discussion the other day that the HN community wasn't even solidly against them, and if this kind of community isn't, then the anti-software-patent movement clearly isn't mainstream enough to make any kind of impact yet.