Genre: Forum

Level3 has joined with Personalweb Technologies to lay complaints against another lengthy list of Internet companies. The defendant list can be seen at the Texas Lawyer blog, and includes Yahoo!, Rackspace, Nexsan Technologies, Apple, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft. Personalweb has previously filed complaints against Amazon, ... Here we go for another serving Most obvious shite with more previous art than one can carry in a shopping bag put on paper and rubberstamped by the patent office, ifanbois jumping to the defense, people who are of the opinion that patents are important to defend the starving inventor and to give value to "intellectual property", RICO claiming that WIndows is bugfree etc... Re: It certainly seems a bit rich Many fighting styles have techniques aimed at using the other fellow's strength to hurt himself. It may well be easier to hasten the demise of the existing patent/lawsuit system mess by making it implode, rather than just railing against it from the sidelines. Re: If legal systems could mate... I'm not sure this article is actually correct? From what I've read about it on other sites, Level3 is only listed in the suits because they are on the patents as a co-owner, yet they have nothing to do with the lawsuits. As for the logic of pursuing all these big name players, they must feel they have something solid, because taking just Apple, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft, if you combined their lawyers and legal budgets, you would be able to rival most small countries! Don't mess with IBM... &gt;they must feel they have something solid Feeling you have something solid is not enough for going against IBM. Just ask the guys who ran SCO to the ground believing they can tax every Linux user, and in the process made the fatal mistake of annoying IBM... (I believe their flimsy case would have unravelled anyway, but IBM's involvement hastened it). Re: Don't mess with IBM... "they must feel they have something solid" Callam McMillan @ 09:21 said "...As for the logic of pursuing all these big name players, they must feel they have something solid... ". They don't need anything solid, they just need something that is expensive to defend against. Prior art has no meaning after the patent has been granted. When challenged with a patent suit like this, a company really only has three options: 1) pay someone else to continue to doing what you do 2) pay to change what you do and pay the penalty of having done it 'wrong' 3) pay to try and prove that the USPO was wrong to grant the patent in the first place, and all subsequent judgements that the patent is valid were also wrong. The extortionists rely on the fact that option one is almost always the cheapest, and remember, if any one of your victims decides that it is cheaper to go with option one, then that is considered evidence that the case is valid and makeing option 3 even more expensive. If you were curoius why so little that is new or innovative has come out of the US in the last 20 years, now you know. Interesting.. .. that there a big moves in the US to (in essence) replicate the system here where a losing litigant pays the other sides costs. That would cut the patent trolls cases down to a handful since they would be liable for big bills if they lose (rather the current situation where a patent troll has very small costs vs the targets very large costs). Of course, they'd then just declare Chapter 11 (hence vacating the judgement), transfer the assets to a new under-bridge-dweller co and rinse, repeat.. This plague of spurious patents will only be solved when the defendants realise that it is a bloody sight cheaper (and more satisfying) to just pay for the assassination of the litigants, their lawyers and every half-wit patent office reviewer who was ever involved in the original patent than it is to spend 5 years in court defending them.