You jest, but they did go after a similarly high-value target, the United States Postal Service: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/help-eff-bust-dangerous-jones-patent

(Note that article was posted more than a year ago, yet this troll keeps on trollin'.)

In short: I couldn't afford to win. I was told $10-25k just for the initial response, and starting at ~$100k for a patent infringement review of my technology, and that barely gets us to pre-trial motions. If they actually went through with the case it would be hundreds of thousands more, and basically no end in sight. This is a startup I'm bootstrapping myself, and I can't even come close to these kinds of expenses.

The courts are a HUGE part of this problem. When I was served, the second packet was 10+ pages of dense legalese straight from the judge on the "pretrial rules". The trolls probably had to pay something like a $500 filing fee in the Southern District of Florida (a place I've never set foot in). And they have no on-shore assets to go after, so proving non-infringement or even proving malicious litigation would be a major uphill battle.

And to make matters worse, after actually suing me in Florida, they came back later and threatened to sue me in Canada for another batch of patents they owned there. So even if I had managed to not go completely destitute defending against them in the US, I'd have to do it all over again in Canada if I wanted to keep providing my app in Canada (where I support a few cities already).

That settlement happened merely a week ago, long after they sued my company (Codemass), and only applies to public transit agencies who are APTA members. (Meaning, it doesn't help any of the literally 100s of other victims of ArrivalStar, nor the future victims who aren't public transit entities).

Also, you are correct that some of ArrivalStar's claims in only 1 of their 30+ patents were recently invalidated, but other key claims remained in that patent and there's no evidence that ArrivalStar has any intention of slowing down.

From another perspective: Are there any truly novel innovations happening in software that can be described in such a way that *experts in the field* can understand and benefit from (not just lawyers), and where they are not simple evolutions of technology (or combinations of technology), and where they can be so narrowly construed so as to not hinder other innovations?

I do believe some fantastic innovations are happening in software. Those are happening despite the horribly broken software patent system. So where do you draw the line between "novel" and "simple evolution" or "natural combination of existing technologies"?

The EFF just recently put up a site exactly for this purpose: https://trollingeffects.org/

Smart Ride is actually a lot more than that. It takes advantage of the phone's capabilities to show nearby stops, maps, alerts, and other realtime info. I love those LED displays and use them all the time, but they aren't available at every stop. And we happen to support 45 or so transit agencies these days, all within one app.

We aren't trying to innovate in the vehicle tracking area. We are innovating around data aggregation (we have a huge and growing database of transit data, most of which is realtime) and around clever ways to present that data to our users. Smart Ride is one of those apps where it has to be on 24/7, be very fast, and very simple (so my mom can understand it). The whole point is to make transit easy for everyone.

But as another poster pointed out, the merits of my entrepreneurial pursuits (or lack thereof, your mind) shouldn't justify me being sued for patent infringement.

PS, that app you linked to is *not* an official SF MTA app. It is another 3rd party developer like me, who apparently is benefitting from the name confusion. As far as I know, SF MTA doesn't have an official app of their own.

My theory was that First Sale Doctrine should apply ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine ). I told the troll that my app 1) didn't do any "vehicle tracking" of its own, and 2) got all its data from NextBus, whom the troll's very own demand letter stated as a licensee. I don't recall exactly what they said in response, but it was effectively a big "so what?". Their demands had nothing to do with the merits of their patents, or the technology used in my app, and only had to do with my app store description which they found which uses the word "track", and with their ability to use the US court system to apply leverage against the small guys.