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Patent Troll With Good Record in Past Sues Netflix, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Others Over Offline Downloads (arstechnica.com)
Netflix added the ability to download movies and TV episodes for offline viewing in November last year. Music streaming service SoundCloud, and video hosting service Vimeo have had this feature for quite some time, too. But they are all being sued now by a patent troll. From an ArsTechnica report: The plaintiff is a company few have heard of: Blackbird Technologies, a company with no products or assets other than patents. Blackbird's business is to buy up patent rights and file lawsuits over them, a business known colloquially as "patent trolling." Last week, Blackbird (who tells potential clients about being "able to litigate at reduced costs and achieve results") filed lawsuits against Netflix, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Starz, Mubi, and Studio 3 Partners, which owns the Epix TV channel. [...] The patent-holding company, which filed the lawsuits in Delaware federal court, has good reason to hope for success. The '362 patent already has a track record of squeezing settlement cash out of big companies.
This is why you see big companies constantly patenting little things that are seemingly obvious or otherwise inane. If you have a patent of your own, it becomes much easier to refute the claim of some other company that you're infringing on their patent. Then they would have to spend time trying to invalidate your patent, which might make it easier to invalidate their own. It probably doesn't even make it to court though as the legal team would just send them a nice "fuck off" letter in reply and the legal hyenas for the patent troll will just look for somewhere else to do their bottom feeding.
Nor should we.
We should always care about Patent Trolling. Patent Trolling is a parasitic problem within our economy. Patent Trolling suppresses innovation, both economic and intellectual. Patent Trolling Negatively impacts people's standard of living, if in a non-direct manner.
If you don't care about this specific instance of patent trolling, you should care about it as an anti-industry that no doubt has and does impact you, even if you're not aware of it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Patents are written in extremely vague terms. It's done on purpose by the original patent writer so that the can capitalize on everything and every innovation that may do the same thing - see Xerox's original patents. They tied up photo copying for decades.
It's just karma.
If you don't like this then have patent laws reformed so that they have to be specific to the invention.
And eliminate software patents.