Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Trolls’ Claim To Own the Interactive Web

You <i>know</i> a patent claim has no merit when even an East Texas court won't accept it.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas#Patent_litigation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...</a>

&#62; The dueling teams of lawyers have spent millions creating elaborate presentations<p>Did the lawyers spend millions, or did they bill millions?

&#62; Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, JP Morgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises International, Rent-A-Center, Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle while this litigation was underway), and Texas Instruments.<p>^^ The list of companies who settled with Eloas before the patent was ruled invalid.<p>A part of me wishes companies had a legal obligation to fight patent claims they believed to be invalid. Settling hurts us all.

I have to wonder when I keep hearing about these cases: if you have say a 50% chance of a favorable ruling on some absurd patent, and the upside is billions of dollars in shakedown payments, backed by the authority of the judicial system, how much would a disreputable company be willing to spend on the chance of getting such a ruling? How many other companies, seeing such rulings, would try to get their own? How many cases would they bring on the chance of getting the ruling? I ask somewhat rhetorically, but of course I'm suggesting by asking the answer is "a lot" and also suspecting that there do exist people that will prop up shell companies that bring case after case after case until they get rulings that enable them to legally blackmail others.

Here's a list of at least some of the companies that fought the patent:<p>Google, Amazon, Adobe, CDW Corp, JCPenney, Staples and Yahoo. [1]<p>Well done guys. Long live the fighters!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-09/google-amazon-com-win-trial-over-interactive-web-patents.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-09/google-amazon-co...</a>

This is important because this Texas court is not just any court but THE court where most patent law is deliberated. The fact that this was struck down here is a victory. Most of these trolls are shell corps setup by a group of lawyers with no technical council strictly to manipulate the legal system to extort money from tech companies willing to settle than battle it out in court. I hope this starts to slow the onslaught of frivolous lawsuits by wanna be lawyers. We spent Millions last year out of our R&#38;D budget to defend ourselves from this nonsense. They target companies with potential and growth and use models to determine optimal circumstances for settlement. Maybe this will slow the destruction of innovation and American jobs driven by these greedy people. Lawyers wonder why they have a bad rap but yet they don't seem to police their own. Sadness:(

Personally, I think it's crazy that some court in Texas even gets a chance at deciding a case with a reach like this.<p>Heck, they were talking about basically shutting down the web or turning it into yet another "you have to pay big bucks to participate" medium of which we definitely have enough already.

Can't believe they settled in just two hours. The claim must have been as specious as it appeared, but like most trolls, they might have lost the battle, but they'll crawl back to wherever they come from and regroup for the next battle.

Thank God. I didn't realize UCal had a stake in this. WTF? Don't they know better?

Well I'm glad to see the end of that. Its quite possible some courts (judges/juries) would not have grasped the true ramifications of this claim and may have opened a can of worms.

I'm glad to learn the jury made the right decision. Sometimes it seems too much to expect even that much. Something really needs to be done to fix this nature of trolling.

Maybe they're seeing so many patents they're starting to realize how many of those patents are just ... stupid?<p>When you're exposed to a field more (lots of cases kinda do that), you start to think more like a person in that field and suddenly previously non-obvious things are obvious!