“Soverain Software, a non-practicing entity that gained media attention for suing Newegg and other online retailers over ‘shopping cart’ patents, on Thursday filed a complaint against Apple for alleged infringement of IP relating to internet-based services,” Mikey Campbell reports for AppleInsider.
“In its lawsuit, filed with the patent holder friendly Eastern District Court of Texas, Soverain leverages four patents developed by e-commerce startup OpenMarket, including the now-bankrupt firm’s Transact product,” Campbell reports. “Transact, along with other technologies describing basic digital shopping carts, were at the heart of Soverain’s attack on major online companies that began more than a decade ago. The NPE set its sights on nearly 50 retailers including giants like Amazon, initially winning infringement rulings worth millions of dollars. As noted by Ars Technica in 2013, however, Soverain’s streak was stopped cold when it applied those same patents to a suit against Newegg. That year, Newegg’s lawyers won an appeal ruling that invalidated the three patents Soverain wielded in its many prior cases.”
Campbell reports, “Now Soverain is back with four more OpenMarket patents it hopes can be used to extract damages from Apple, and potentially other big tech firms.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some patent trolls never die, they just morph and wend their way through weak points in the system like cancer.
In the old days this would have been solved with a public lynching. I’m going waaaaaay back with this.
And, in the “old days” the court system was interested in right and wrong.
Today’s court system is only interested in “the law”. Further, lawyers are only interested in “winning” and “fees”.
Whether something makes sense or whether it is right has no place in the U.S. legal system today.
When you bring ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ into a judgement, usually those values are subjectively based on the culture making the judgement. The move to focus on ‘law’ or written and agreed upon rules allows a judgement to be more objective and tied a bit less to the culture which at least as a concept is a ‘fairer’ way to make a ruling. This also creates a strong guideline that a judge can ground his more compassionate final decision on.
“Whether something makes sense or whether it is right has no place in the U.S. legal system today.” I believe this is the central reason Juries are important. They hopefully provide the ‘present day’ sentiments of what makes sense or whether it is right. In Juried cases the Judge’s role is significantly reduced to making sure the Jury’s decision is made considering the proper ‘lawful’ procedures and really takes no part in the final decision.
Not all business is good business, humans (government) just can’t say no.
The court system is a private for-profit corporation, just like the prison system, and even the government. This fact should NOT be a surprise to anyone by now. As a result of this disposition, the Court System does not care HOW it makes that profit. Meaning it is not interested in the discovery of the truth no matter what the cost is to the litigants. It is only interested in how much it will line its pockets with the booty it collects.
No wonder it is a Maxim of law, “The law is nothing without Equity, and Equity is Everything, even WITHOUT the Law.” From this maxim alone it begs the question why are people still pursuing litigation in any for-profit statutory court that administrates the Law of the Sea? It is beyond all commonsense, logic and reason to do so, knowing this Nevertheless, Equity is the cure for it. And, I do not mean the pseudo version of equity that is administrated in the statutory (admiralty) for-profit courts.
If one wants to put an end to such frivolous lawsuits and their abuse then take their petition/complaint into Equity and use the Maxims of Equity WITH the Law to get to the Truth of the matter before the Court, and obtain a determination from that Court of Equity that will nullify and void any and all judgments from the lower statutory (admiralty) for-profit courts. Problem solved.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/03/macrosolve-donald-trump-jr-patents/
And now we see a relationship between the Trump empire and patent trolls.
Looking at the third patent in suit, it appears to be a mere description of how the system of resolving readable URLs are converted to numeric addressing for the Internet, and then determining whether the page is an authorized secure page or not. It is not something that is really that can be attributable to a patent infringement of Apple. It is more a standards necessary requirement to use the internet. . . and probably should never have been granted to the “Inventor” in the first place, being merely a description of things already being done as a normal course of communications on the internet.
Reading that same patent I got the impression that the ‘invention’ being patented was the Session ID (SID) and not the conversion of resolving an URL to a numerical address as you state. (see “Summary of the Invention”)
Considering the filing for that patent is June 7, 1995 browsers were just getting started. If upheld the patent would probably be a Standards Essential Patent and would be licensed accordingly.
Either way, it certainly would be a SEP. They spent an inordinate amount of time & verbiage in the patent claims describing the conversion.