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Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

The texas east district stuff is fascinating. What if the app and software developers start licensing their apps with a license and technical measures explicitly excluding East Texas (or the entire state of texas, for extra safety) from the operation of the app.

It could be enforced by some soft of geofencing at app startup that splashes a "You're from East Texas, our app doesn't work there" type language. Will that affect the ability of the trolls to venue shop at least (if not to bring the suite in the first place).

Of course an even better response would be if smartphone vendors disable their entire OS's in that district. That might be fun.

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I like this idea a lot.

If the population living in the causative region understands the nature of what their governing body is doing to impact and infringe upon on the rest of the world, maybe they'll change who holds the relevant positions of power.

It would be great if we could do this to websites and technology in general as well. Maybe we can start with this kind of campaign [1], but utilize geo-IP targeting.

[1] http://internetdefenseleague.org/

It's a federal court, the State of Texas has nothing to do with it. These judges are appointed by the President.

With the recommendation and consultation of the representative for the district and the two Senators for the state. Who clearly have something to do with this. How else can you explain east texas being the venue of choice?

A friend of mine who's a patent lawyer explained it to me once. Some time back the chief judge started putting patent cases at the top of his docket so his district became known as a having "rocket docket" and began attracting patent cases from across the country. A cottage industry sprung up in the area and the rest is history.

It's a rather small jurisdiction, so there are only a few judges there and not very many cases aside from patent cases. The fact that there are a number of very pro-patent precedents there only tended to drive it further, as the plaintiffs usually get to decide where to litigate and will seek every advantage.

One suggestion was that the court was the least busy federal court around (all the other federal courts were swamped with drug cases). So patent cases started appearing there. Once the judges in the area became so-called "experts" on it, more and more companies started to file their cases there.

NPR (well, technically This American Life) did a special on it a couple years ago[0]. It's fun to listen to. It may not tell the whole story, but it at least paints a decent picture.

[0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...

It wouldn't keep you out of jurisdiction (and might even piss of the judge), but it would send an interesting message.

Apparently geolocation is now to be a form of discrimination we can really get behind!

Note that since Lodsys apparently sues over use of in-app purchases, you don't even have to block the app entirely, which would fall foul of the App Store guidelines on iOS (2.22) and might alienate users. Just disable the in-app purchases...

I've wondered about this, too. Would this approach be a legit workaround for this problem?

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