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Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Awesome Principled Stand by Newegg! This is one of the reasons to support buying from them.

However this only underscores how easy it is to sue over flimsy patents and how expensive and time-consuming it is to go after and shut down these horrible trolls. Add to this the fact that Patent reform was killed in the Senate by Pat Leahy & Harry Reid (Both of whom are notorious supporters of trial lawyers & pharma) and it is a net loss for the tech industry this week

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What fascinates me is how easy it is to fight if you practice. Lee Cheng is impressive, but I suspect his secret weapon is actually having fought a bunch of such cases knowing he has a 'fuck them, they are going to lose' mandate. An enemy who's very practiced at -not- settling is probably not something his opponents know how to deal with.

Newegg has always been against paying out even way back in the day when I worked there. In the early days of patent trolling, someone sued us in a printer-related lawsuit and they offered to settle for a small sum (VERY small). Basically, the in-house lawyer said that it would cost more money to fight it given his hourly wage but that the CEO was not going to pay if it was a frivolous lawsuit. I see that the same principle has persisted now, a decade later.

It's strange that more companies don't see the long term problems created by signaling that you're willing to spend money to settle frivolous lawsuits. Another symptom of the corporate world's excessive focus on the short term?

Not all companies have as much power as Newegg to fight back. I'm guessing it does often make financial sense to just pay it, otherwise companies would have turned the tables already. I don't think it's a lack of long term thinking as much as it is a tragedy of the commons related situation.

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