Here’s a piece of good news! 😀 Rackspace killed a patent troll! Yayyyyy… Score one for the good guys, and sanity! One down… so many to go!

Rackspace Helps Kill A Patent Troll: Rotating Your Smartphone Is No Longer Infringing

Summary if you don’t want to read the whole thing:

Rackspace has successfully defeated a patent troll called Rotatable Technologies by having its patent (US Patent 6,326,978) invalidated:

“Rotatable owned a patent that it claimed covers the screen rotation technology that comes standard in just about every smartphone. You know, when you flip your device sideways and the screen shifts orientation from portrait mode to landscape mode? Like nearly all the apps in the Apple and Android app stores, Rackspace uses standard functionality provided by Apple’s libraries and Android open source software to provide this display feature in our mobile cloud applications.

Rotatable sued us and immediately asked for $75,000 to go away. We refused. And we fought. It’s Rackspace policy to not pay off patent trolls, even if it costs us more to fight. Eventually Rotatable offered to just walk away – but we refused again. Just as we promised last year, we challenged the patent and the USPTO invalidated it.”

As Rackspace says, the company is now “an ex-patent troll.” Kudos to Rackspace for fighting and winning, rather than giving in to the troll.

And this one, which shows how insane the US Patent system is!
Alice Ruling Kills Another Patent Dead, As Lumen View Patent Troll Drops Appeal

If you don’t recall, Lumen View holds a patent (US Patent 8,069,073) (now officially and finally decided as invalid) for a “system and method for facilitating bilateral and multilateral decision making.” Don’t ask what that means because it doesn’t mean much. Even before the Alice ruling, the district court had said the patent was invalid as merely being an “abstract idea” and thus unpatentable subject matter.

Throughout the case, Lumen View (and its lawyers) had done some astounding things, including claiming that FindTheBest’s CEO committed a hate crime for calling Lumen View a patent troll. Lumen View’s lawyers later sought a gag order against FindTheBest’s Kevin O’Connor, demanding that he remove from the internet his discussions about Lumen View and his willingness to fight back against the troll rather than give in.

WTF?! Seriously? *sigh*

As Burns wrote:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!