Good news for everyone who thinks that patent suits have gotten out of control — it looks like there could be one less patent troll stalking the wilds for prey. Ars Technica has a long piece detailing how online retailer Newegg successfully defeated a lawsuit filed by patent holding firm Soverain Software that accused Newegg of infringing upon patents covering the online “shopping cart” that customers use on retail websites to virtually hold the goods they want to buy.
The best news for online retailers, Ars reports, is that Newegg successfully got three of Soverain’s patents invalidated, which “effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Home Depot, RadioShack, Kohl’s, and many others.”
“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bulls—,'” Newegg chief legal officer Lee Cheng. “We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”
