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Patent Trolls Target Small East Texas Companies
An anonymous reader writes "In a sign that patent trolls are getting desperate to keep their cases in East Texas — long known as the friendliest venue for their claims — some have taken to suing tiny, no-name companies that are run by East Texas residents. The hope is that, if at least one defendant is located in East Texas, the judge will keep the entire case there. Nate Neel, a Longview, Texas resident with a small open source software company called CitiWare, was sued by Bedrock Computer Technologies in June despite (he claims) having no customers or other meaningful operations of any kind. In response, Mr. Neel has posted a strongly worded letter to Bedrock's attorneys on his Web site. It will be interesting to see how East Texas judges respond to this abuse of process perpetrated against their own residents."
This doesn't really have anything to do with local legislators. Patent disputes are usually handled in US District Court, meaning that the reason why the Eastern District of Texas has been so friendly to patent trolls is because an unusual number of federal judges in that district are unusually biased in favor of plaintiffs in patent disputes.
The Parking Lot is Full, Dec 04
There are like, 54 different comics on that page. Which one is the relevant one?
That's why I said "Dec 04" in my citation.
Why should a website be so poorly structured as to not have any direct links to single comics?
Likely because people have been embedding single comics in forum posts and running up the (self-)publisher's bandwidth bill.