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Newegg Defeats Alcatel-Lucent in Third Patent Win This Year
Newegg's policy of not backing down from patent trolls, even ones as large as Alcatel-Lucent, continues to result in victory. Earlier this year, Overstock and Newegg successfully defended themselves with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent's main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle. Naturally, Alcatel-Lucent appealed, but the appeals court quickly ruled in favor of Newegg and Overstock.com. From Ars: "Federal Circuit judges typically take months, and occasionally years, to review the patent appeals that come before them. Briefs in this case were submitted last year, and oral arguments were held last Friday, May 10. The three-judge panel upheld Newegg's win (PDF), without comment — in just three days. ... Alcatel-Lucent dropped the case over its other two patents, desperate to get back the '131 patent that Newegg and Overstock had killed at trial. 'If they had been able to revive this patent, the litigation machine would have continued on,' Reines told Reuters after the win."
They really need to stop granting patents to generic and vague stuff. Besides, the stuff in that patent was done decades before Amazon even existed.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Of the patent(s) at hand would have been nice...
Give 'em hell, Newegg!
Another big PC build order comin' your way! Keep on winning
BTW, on a sad note, does anyone remember when Lucent actually innovated stuff? The legitimate heir of Western Electric and Bell Labs has fallen very far.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
How did they end up owning this patent? Alcatel-Lucent is not on the original patent. Also, now that the patent has been thrown out, what changes in here? I can't find anything in there showing its updated status.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
...with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent's main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Amazon wasn't forced to settle. They almost certainly chose to settle because it was cheaper. It's the corporate equivalent of the coward's way out.
THIS is why I give my business to companies like NewEgg, and have and will NEVER buy a single damn thing from ones like Amazon.
Amazon settled because it is also a patent troll. Blood runs thicker than water, especially between patent trolls.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
The patent office should have to pay the legal fees of the winning side every time a patent is defeated in court.
The patent office are the gate keepers. They are currently enabling all the patent shakedowns.
For proper control every system needs proper negative feedback. If the patent office gets money for granting patents and does not lose money for granting bogus patents they are going to grant everything under the sun to encourage more applications and more incoming money.
Only by penalizing the patent office for improper patent granting will there be a proper measure of control.
The best way to deal with a playground bully is to punch him in the face. Even if he has his buddies with him. Even if you'll get disciplined by the school. You do that a few times, and no one will mess with you.
The same principle applies to patent trolls: Always fight if you can at all manage it.
I am officially gone from
i wanted to scan the opinion, but there is none. and the decision says nonprecedential.
not a lawyer but it seems this decision cannot set a legal precedent for future cases
This article http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corporate-troll-alcatel-in-third-patent-appeal-win-this-year/#p3 explains the case.
Essentially everyone had given up. The patent covered eCommerce.
NewEgg did not give up.
Newegg might be smaller than Lucent, but they are still not a Mon 'n' Pop. I know that in the corporate mind anything under a thousand employees is "small business" but, face it, Newegg is not small business.
The real tragedy with patent trolls is that the *real* small business can not fight them. They can shut down a business writing innovative software with 2-3 employees just like that.
Good for Newegg, but treating it like a David vs. Goliath win is not too smart.
I worked for ALU doing an internal start up.
While we were in stealth mode, the ex-Bell Labs "chief researchers" were desperately trying to obtain our product ideas and data mine the patent filings we'd made. What their intention was, I don't know. However, any attempts at friendly conversation failed and they actively worked to inhibit our progress - slowing funding and equipment purchase requests. They failed and we eventually won initial trial contracts with several big US telecom providers.
1 month before we came out of stealth mode and delivered prototypes to those companies, the Bell Lab's jerks orchestrated a reorg placing us under their umbrella. When we released, the ALU marketing reports trumpeted, "...another ground breaking innovation from Bell Labs!" Far from it, the @$$'s actively impeded us every step of the way until we couldn't be stopped.
The did eventually get their way though. After successful trials and initial product delivery, the "strategic acquisitions" arm of Bell Labs, elected to spend millions on start up run by the son-in-law of one of the senior VPs. Our customers were pissed, as the other product sucked in comparison and was very slow in delivering requested enhancements during the side-by-side bake off between us and them. ALU then proceeded to ship our work to a maintenance team in eastern Europe and forced us, under threat of firing for cause, to train the scabs.
ALU and Bell Labs can DIAF... Go Newegg!
> Am I the only one that read the patent and thought it was extremely vague and so general that it describes almost every client-server relationship since the beginning of the computing?
It seems the answer is no. The judges, in the trial and the appeal, also thought it was a bogus patent.
What happens with the settlements that Amazon and others made over this patent? Can that money be clawed back?
Verbum caro factum est
I loved NewEgg plenty BEFORE this, but where I rated them a 9/10 in my mind before, now they're closer to a 15/10.
And now, a shameless testimonial from a real NewEgg customer - last year I built my first PC in almost 7 years and NewEgg made the experience really easy with good pricing and an awesome "wishlist" feature that let me compile a list of parts and tally cost as a I went. I would never consider building a PC without them, I had a really positive experience building my rig with them.
Go NewEgg.
The other window currently has half of a new pcs parts picked out.
Maybe i'll pay for the extra fast processing today. (total bs but hey wtf)
yay newegg!
So, does Amazon now get to sue Alcatel-Lucent for the amount of their settlement, as they were being extorted for greenmail on something that now doesn't exist, and isn't enforceable?
Let the blowback begin!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Are the extortion victims entitled to refunds now? It seems as though settlements based on invalid patents are made under false pretences and fraudulent. Certainly letting them keep any of the money they stole from their victims sets a very bad precedent.
You've got to admit, any wood filler that requires two gallons of Japan is pretty novel
I think they're essentially trying to patent the Adapter Pattern for any telecommunications protocol
Though it reads like you can get around it by including spaces in any encrypted strings
It it truly amazing how stupid people are when it comes to investing in, respecting, and keeping Basic Research free from market pressures and profits. How many countless breakthroughs and completely new markets have been created by some free thinkers who were allowed to do just that? But from an idiot congress critter chairman on the House 'science' committee to the scourge of humanity (anyone with an MBA), they all see basic research as a waste of time and money.
This is why we'e doomed as a species; the population and power of morons and greedheads far outweigh those folks who can still think abstractly and can see beyond the next fucking quarter.
There's something creepy when Newegg now sends me emails about 30% off rice cookers. Not sure if they have to deversify as the PC market (um, matures?), or they want to go head to head with said Amazon.
The SHIELD Act was introduced by Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR) on February 27, 2013.
It creates a "loser pays" system for certain types of lawsuits, in which do-nothing patent holders will be forced to pay the defendant's legal bills if they lose their lawsuit. However, losing defendants won't have to pay, so it's more like a "losing plaintiff pays" system.
Following up, another act introduced by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on May 2, 2013, seeks to dramatically lower the cost of patent litigation.
Call/write your congressman.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Is a physical object .
Nice try, but the physical object argument has many loopholes.
From what I know -I've met some people there- Alcatel has some very serious development - and a lot of experience with being ripped of by chinese copycats. Not what you associate with patent trolls. So I'm a bit surprised by the wording in the article.Then again. I don't know Lucent.
Unfortunately, Plan 9 is still released under the Lucent Public License.
I truly believe patents (and the vehicle, agriculture and pharmaceuticals industry earlier on) have brought the United States to it's knees. Once it became possible to litigate instead of innovate, progress came to a halt.
The worst part is realising just how devastating the patent laws have been to the computing sciences and the software industry. Two decades of progress and innovation have been misspent on fixing UNIX in the form of Linux instead of targeting Plan 9. Layers upon layers of abstractions written to solve inherit design problems that should have been addressed from the bottoms up. Concurrency, inter-process communication, interpreters, window mangers... So much time spent on answering the wrong questions. On writing frameworks and toolkits that abstract and hide the failing of the system's kernel and the system's programming language. On trying to comply to standards, conventions and design paradigms that were never meant to survive for more then a few years under different machines an usages but instead lasted 3 decades.
Just seeing what passes as innovation in this age of darkness... Electrical engines in cars, targeted drugs, genetically engineered crops, Cloud computing...
We're decades behinds where we should have been all because of the patents laws.
That is the article linked in the summary, ya rube.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Looking at the filing date and the Assignee's on the patent you will see that this patent was originally filed by AT&T in 1992. This was in the glory days between the original 1984 divestiture of the Bell operating companies and the 1994 split of AT&T Long Lines and AT&T Networks (aka Western Electric). AT&T Networks became Lucent Technologies, which then merged in 2007 with Alcatel to become Alcatel-Lucent.