An anonymous reader writes: We've written a few times about Vringo, a patent troll (which got its name, and public stock status, from a reverse merger with a basically defunct public "video ringtone" company and a pure patent troll called I/P Engine). The company was using some very broad patents (6,314,420 and 6,775,664) to claim that Google and Microsoft were infringing based on how their search ad programs worked ..
The case took a slight detour into the bizarre when Microsoft not only settled with Vringo for $1 million — but also with a promise to pay 5% of whatever Google had to pay ..
Between February and now, however, something wonderful happened. That something wonderful was the Supreme Court's ruling in CLS Bank v. Alice. As we noted at the time, depending on how you read it, it certainly could be interpreted that nearly all software patents were invalid — even as the ruling itself insisted that wasn't the case. Still, the early returns are promising, with CAFC (apparently finally getting the message) starting to smack down software patents.
