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[isthisthingon]

http://techdirt.com/articles/20091216/0819597385.shtml

Things that make you go "hmmmmm...."

The lawsuit is filed by a shell company called BetaNet, and no one seems willing to speak. The lawyers representing BetaNet won't say who is behind the company, or how they even got the patent. This is typical. Many of these types of lawsuits are filed by shell companies to hide who is actually behind them. As for the defendants, here's the list:

    Adobe, Apple, Arial Software, Autodesk, Carbonite, Corel, Kodak, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, McAfee, Online Holdings, Oracle, Rockwell, Rosetta Stone, SAP, Siemens, and Sony.

[kurdt]

Nice... somebody's getting a big payday.. congrats to him/them.

[perkiset]

There are so many patent troll companies it's amazing. All they do is pickup patents (a small investment to the inventor probably years old) and then squat them like 800 numbers that spell something. Or domains. It's just another type of squat, but it's really ugly.

[isthisthingon]

It's just another type of squat, but it's really ugly.

Agreed.  Here's a rare time that I'd be a champion for Oracle, Apple and Microsoft at the same time.  It's hard to cause me to want to defend Oracle.  But the good part is that people who try to get away with this stuff and succeed are doing the best possible thing to get our patent/IP system reworked.  There's some deep pockets on the business end of this lawsuit and if anything serious actually happens here I'm thinking all of a sudden Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and the like will cry foul on the patent system and proceed to legally wrangle this little fish until it leaves them alone.

Or more nefariously, this stinky little producer of nothing will accept some ridiculously small payout from them, some undisclosed amount, and then he'll sail off to some island and our broken system will wait around for another crook to steal from those who actually produce things.

Grrr!

[perkiset]

Si. Adios a Estados Unidos.

Bon chance, and all.