[Swordmaker]

18 companies. Oh my. Looks to me as if this patent might be a lot obvious...

[Malsua]

Patent lawyer fishing for a big payoff.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Sounds like they lay in wait until the 17-year patent life was about to expire so as to catch as many fish in the net as possible.

Seems to me there ought to be an adverse-possession aspect to a patent... if you don't enforce it early and often, you lose it.

[colorado tanker]

Eastern District of Texas is notorious. Probably a patent troll.

[ShadowAce]

[Swordmaker]

Apple and 17 other tech companies sued in East Texas Rocket Docket Court for infringing 1993 software registration patent PING!

Rocket Docket Patent Suit Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Star Traveler]

I fear that one of these days I’m going to be named in a patent lawsuit because of the procedure I use for cooking my scrambled eggs in the morning... LOL...

I’ll have to admit that I’ll probably have no defense... :-)

[TChris]

Shouldn’t be too hard to find “prior art” for this concept, predating 1993.

[dfwgator]

Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes

[TheBattman]

They selectively left off several other publishers that also use similar technology.