There are two big problems here - as pointed out by the other commentators, this company is very much a patent troll. The label fits.
The other problem is that the protections offered by patents were designed at to give a "temporary monopoly" on the invention at hand. For software patents, though, this "temporary monopoly" ends up being (sometimes) five times the lifetime of that given technology. This is partly because the barriers for "inventing" something in the software space are minimal. Cloud hosting for services makes it possible for a small inventor to provide a large service inexpensively (or, at least without large upfront expenses). Traditional software requires only time and a place to download. What happens with software patents is the "inventor" is effectively given a monopoly over more than the effective lifetime of the product and for reasons that don't fit with the original design of the patent system.
Then there's the relative "quality" of those patents. Patents are supposed to be a way to make an invention public so that a person skilled in the field is able to reproduce the invention from the patent, alone. That's laughable if you've read any of the kinds of patents that end up in this kind of litigation. The patent is written in an artform designed to make the description of the invention as vague as possible (to cover as much infringement as possible) and is accepted by an overworked patent office that doesn't have people skilled in the field enough to actually evaluate whether a patent application should be accepted and granted this temporary-turned-lifetime monopoly protection.
These facts are what are doing harm to the patent system and it's no surprise, to me. I am not anti-patent[1]. I believe the protections as they were intended are a good idea. They're being abused, horribly, these days and the system around it needs to be brought back to its roots. Inventions with large barriers to production (drugs, where it can cost an incredible amount of money to get through regulatory approvals, for instance) should be allowed reasonable lengths of time for monopoly protections to encourage their development[2], but things that are novel, and have little-to-no barriers to production should have extremely limited or no protection from the patent system and trolling in this manner should come with penalties (plaintiff pays).
[1] OK, I'm vehemently against software patents and I have a serious problem with gene patents (I can't patent a rock, or the definition of the characteristics of a rock, I shouldn't be able to patent the characteristics of a molecule,... it's an over-simplification, but that's my opinion on the subject).
[2] There's plenty wrong here, too, but it's the best example I could come up with.
The other problem is that the protections offered by patents were designed at to give a "temporary monopoly" on the invention at hand. For software patents, though, this "temporary monopoly" ends up being (sometimes) five times the lifetime of that given technology. This is partly because the barriers for "inventing" something in the software space are minimal. Cloud hosting for services makes it possible for a small inventor to provide a large service inexpensively (or, at least without large upfront expenses). Traditional software requires only time and a place to download. What happens with software patents is the "inventor" is effectively given a monopoly over more than the effective lifetime of the product and for reasons that don't fit with the original design of the patent system.
Then there's the relative "quality" of those patents. Patents are supposed to be a way to make an invention public so that a person skilled in the field is able to reproduce the invention from the patent, alone. That's laughable if you've read any of the kinds of patents that end up in this kind of litigation. The patent is written in an artform designed to make the description of the invention as vague as possible (to cover as much infringement as possible) and is accepted by an overworked patent office that doesn't have people skilled in the field enough to actually evaluate whether a patent application should be accepted and granted this temporary-turned-lifetime monopoly protection.
These facts are what are doing harm to the patent system and it's no surprise, to me. I am not anti-patent[1]. I believe the protections as they were intended are a good idea. They're being abused, horribly, these days and the system around it needs to be brought back to its roots. Inventions with large barriers to production (drugs, where it can cost an incredible amount of money to get through regulatory approvals, for instance) should be allowed reasonable lengths of time for monopoly protections to encourage their development[2], but things that are novel, and have little-to-no barriers to production should have extremely limited or no protection from the patent system and trolling in this manner should come with penalties (plaintiff pays).
[1] OK, I'm vehemently against software patents and I have a serious problem with gene patents (I can't patent a rock, or the definition of the characteristics of a rock, I shouldn't be able to patent the characteristics of a molecule,... it's an over-simplification, but that's my opinion on the subject).
[2] There's plenty wrong here, too, but it's the best example I could come up with.