A patent-holding company called Minero Digital seeks to exact royalty payments on a wide range of USB hubs, suing more than two dozen retailers and manufacturers last year. But the “non-practicing entity” dropped its East Texas lawsuit against Newegg subsidiary Rosewill within days of getting a call from the company’s lawyer.

Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng says the move is necessary since Minero dismissed its Texas lawsuit without prejudice, meaning it can refile the case at a time of its choosing.

“We just don’t believe Rosewill’s products and customers infringed on valid patent claims,” said Cheng. “Minero’s case does not have merit, and its patent is not only expired but would suck even if it wasn’t expired. Now that they have started the litigation, it would be irresponsible for Newegg to not finish it.”

Source: Newegg sues patent troll that dropped its case

Good for NewEgg! Patent Trolls represent only part of what is bad from the patenting system, hopefully one day it will be possible to sue these guys in such a way that patent trolling becomes impossible.

Graphical slider bars like this – used for setting audio volume, fill color, or the zoom scale of a document – have been around since the dawn of the mouse because it’s obviously the most efficient way of adjustment. But in 2007 Microsoft was granted design patent D554,140 [PDF], giving it rights to the concept.

On December 18, Microsoft cited the design patent, along with eight others, in a lawsuit against Corel (remember them?) for copying the design style of Redmond’s Office suite in the Canadian firm’s Home Office software.

Source: What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

Patents and copyright are stupid and should never last for more than 5 years.

But continues challenging validity of patents

Source: Rounded corners on Android phones cost Samsung $548m: It will pay up to Apple after all

So, Apple managed to patent the square and also the square with rounded corners. Seriously? We still have patents with this kind of crap?!

Namco patented this idea in 1995 and since then no one has been able to releive the boredom of the loading screen. I’m sure this demonstrates how patents lead to innovation. Not.

Source: Loading Screen Jam – itch.io