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How Newegg Saved Online Retail
bargainsale writes with an account at Ars Technica of "the inspiring story of Newegg vs the patent troll. Perhaps the system does work after all." Newegg's lawyer Lee Cheng has some choice words for the business model employed by Soverain Software, the patent troll which tried, with some success, to exact money from online retailers for using online shopping carts. Newegg has prevailed, though, and Soverain's claims are toast. From Ars: "The ruling effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom's, Macy's, Home Depot, Radioshack, Kohl's, and many others (see our chart on page 2). All of them did nothing more than provide shoppers with basic online checkout technology. Soverain used two patents, numbers 5,715,314 and 5,909,492, to claim ownership of the "shopping carts" commonly used in online stores. In some cases, it wielded a third patent, No. 7,272,639."
the nigger in the woodpile is the word `legitimate'. in short, the legitimate point of patents is to protect the investment required to produce actual innovations. however, patents are nowadays issued much more broadly than this. just because a patent is issued, does not make it legitimate.
a patent troll is someone who either 1) patents (or acquires the patent for) something already widespread, or uses a submarine patent to accomplish the same, in order to extort $ or chill competition, or 2) patents a routine solution to a relatively trivial and routine subproblem which emerges while accomplishing the original goal, so as to set up landmines for competitors. both of these would be mitigated if the USPTO simply enforced their rules on originality, which they do not, either out of incompetence or ideology.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
A nation of rent-seeking lunatics.
Lets face facts here. If you own a patent and someone infringes on it then you by all rights SHOULD sue them. If this guy legtimately owned a patent that was misused without his permission then he has every right to protect his patent.
But people on the net love to yell patent troll anymore because its get them attention to their website because guys flood in to mindlessly start yelling about trolls when they have no legal knowledge and hell most of them dont even read the story. They want to bitch about what everyone else is bitching about because its a bandwagon mentality.
Anymore according to the internet you are automatically a patent troll if you file suit for any reason against anyone over a patent issue. It doesnt matter how right or wrong you are, if you file a suit your automatically labeled a patent troll.