Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

TLDW - Patent troll sues Xplane creator after he migrated his app to the Google play store. They claim they own the general idea of the Google play store. Law firms create these cases for billable hours for their lawyers and some of their parent judges in Texas. Patent trolls and law firms in the end want to receive a settlement by targeting app creators and not Google themselves who are well equipped to defend themselves, http://www.thepatentscam.com/ .

View on HN

Logically, how is this even possible? Xplane does not own Google Play Store and Xplane is not aware that Google is violating a patent then how is Xplane responsible for the patent violation? This strikes me a 15 minute conversation in front of a judge. "Sir, I did not know Google was violating a patent and I have withdrawn my application after being told so" and that should be the end of it.

Because this particular judge refuses to throw out illegitimate patent cases because he's corrupt as fuck. He recently retired, but presumably someone else just filled his place.

Wow, does this happen to many people who put their stuff on Google Play? What about the Apple App Store?

Seems like Google/Apple should step in and cover the costs of being sued by a patent troll for using their platform... if they don't want developers to be discouraged from using it.

Then again, particularly in Apple's case, it's not like the developers have much of a choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com