
“Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF formerly http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/2011-1009.Opinion.1-17-2013.1.PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war. The ruling effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Home Depot, RadioShack, Kohl’s, and many others.”