A few thoughts:

1. The complaint here presents Hipmunk as the developer of an innovative travel search engine that offers something great that no one has ever offered and, hence, as a rising star in its market. It contrasts this with i2z Technology, LLC, - a Marshall, Texas shell entity run by a Silicon Valley lawyer - that invented nothing through its own efforts, that took an assignment of a soon-to-expire 1992 patent in July, 2011, that sued a score of mostly-large companies in the fall of 2011 for allegedly infringing that patent, and that made a letter demand on Hipmunk to take a license from it or be immediately sued. It notes, very pointedly, that the innovation done by Hipmunk from which so many people stand to benefit has no connection whatever with the patent upon which i2z threatens to sue. It further notes that, on the face of it, the primary claim of the patent in issue deals with two-window configurations not even used by Hipmunk. And it identifies prior art that Hipmunk claims invalidates the patent. Finally, the complaint states that this demand came to Hipmunk only after it had raised significant VC funding for the purpose of continuing to grow and to innovate and, rather than use these funds to pay for a worthless "license," it has instead elected to fight to expose this for the bogus claim that it is.

2. The themes of the complaint are almost a template for what is wrong with U.S. software patents at their worst. Patents are supposed to protect and encourage innovation. They are supposed to take things that would otherwise remain secret and get inventors to disclose this secret know-how so that it can be absorbed into an ever-broadening public pool of knowledge for society's benefit and, as a trade-off, give the inventor a limited monopoly barring all others from using the invention for a limited time even if those others developed it entirely independently of the efforts of the inventor. To get this monopoly protection, the innovation has to be truly inventive and not such that those skilled in the relevant art would see it as obvious in light of prior art; and it must be practical and useful as applied to real-world activities and cannot be so abstract and vague that it amounts to an idea, a law of nature, or a mere concept. To benefit society, the monopoly protection must extend to a point deemed reasonable for rewarding the inventor but not so long as to give him a windfall at the longer-term expense of others. All of these concepts applied beautifully to an industrial age where inventions tended to be tied to heavy machinery or to other innovation tied to long and expensive development cycles and where the resulting inventions were discrete and significant departures from the analog-style forms of prior art that preceded them.

3. Digital technology, when first deployed, tended to fit within the historical patterns but not so with software. When it comes to software development, development cycles have become extremely rapid. The ability, or even the inventor's desire, to keep innovation secret and undisclosed has severely contracted and, in a sense, much of what is innovative in software is an open book, with a whole universe of developers drawing from the same or similar sources and deriving very similar outcomes without reference to one another's work. Change comes quickly and incrementally and knowledge of that change rapidly becomes widespread. Often such changes, when reduced to practice, can only be described in vague ways that might be applied in all sorts of surprising ways to future incremental changes and, hence, the monopoly rights tied to such vagaries hang like a menacing cloud over anything that anybody might do in those areas. And even things that truly might be classified as inventive in light of prior art can be seen as being of very limited value in the broader swirl of rapid technological change within even a few years of the time they are given patent protection and hence giving every appearance of society's having given the inventor a 20-year windfall over what should instead have been incremental stuff worthy of 3-year protection at most. Now add to the mix an underfunded and besieged patent office whose examiners are not particularly qualified to make consistent, astute judgments about innovation involving software and who are effectively under quota-pressure to keep the patent grants moving along in the system - add further an enforcement system that imposes multi-million dollar costs upon those who seek to enforce their patents and also upon those who seek to defend against claims of infringement and that produces widely variable results tied to a jury system in which those passing the ultimate judgment can easily be confused and bamboozled in evaluating technical claims - add further that the appellate review level concerning patents has been placed in the hands of a specialized court having exceedingly close and sympathetic ties with the patent bar and with the idea of broad-based patent enforcement remedies (including potentially crippling injunctions) - add further that a specialized judicial district in a backwater Texas area routinely provides favorable treatment for patent claimants even when claims are weak or frivolous - add further that patent rights, being freely assignable, can be gathered in the hands of shell entities having no connection with any form of innovation but being intimately tied to a system whose purpose is to play the enforcement system to its maximum value in order to force parties to pay up or get swept into a litigation mess - yes, added all together, this becomes one lethal brew whose poisons now maim or kill, rather than encourage, the innovation that the patent system was designed to foster.

4. I am by no means hostile to IP rights generally. These can and do protect various forms of creative effort in ways that can benefit society. Still, IP rights when abused are the worst form of perverseness in a technologically-driven society and can and do damage society in serious ways. You wind up with those who have not innovated a day in their lives making debilitating demands on those engaged in brilliant innovation in furtherance of a cynical shake-down process that amounts to a toll on innovation with no offsetting benefits. The patent system has served the U.S. well for over 200 years. Its structure was put in place with the pace and methods of innovation fostered by the industrial revolution. That structure did not envision digital technology as embodied in software and has in the past 20 years become corrupted. It is time for a rethinking of what it takes in the patent area to encourage and protect software innovation. The current system, as exemplified in the Hipmunk case, is absurdly broken.