Digg And Others Sued For Infringing Infamous Computer Solitaire Patent
from the aren't-patents-great? dept — The Patent Troll Tracker is back from holiday vacation and he's got quite a post listing out a bunch of interesting (i.e., depressing) lawsuits involving questionable patents and even more questionable patent holders.
Context & Ripple Effects
The suit arrives via the Patent Troll Tracker's year-end roundup of cases filed in the last two weeks of December, which flags a cluster of lawsuits built on questionable patents held by equally questionable plaintiffs — the computer solitaire patent at issue here being infamous enough that Techdirt leads with sarcasm rather than analysis.
For Digg specifically, the timing compounds an already eventful stretch: the company confirmed in December 2007 that it had retained an investment bank to find a buyer at a reported $300 million-plus price, and it had already weathered earlier IP-adjacent noise like the trademark confusion episode in 2006. A patent suit naming the company is exactly the kind of open liability a diligence team will now have to price.
First-order effects
- Digg must fund a legal defense against a claim over a decades-old card-game patent — a direct cost and management distraction landing mid-sale process, with any acquirer inheriting the case at closing.
- The other defendants named alongside Digg in the same batch of December filings face identical infringement claims, meaning settlement or defense strategy gets set across multiple companies at once.
Second-order effects
- Any site exposing similar casual-game functionality becomes a candidate for the same demand letter, since a granted patent on something as generic as solitaire gameplay leaves little room to design around it.
- Buyers evaluating Digg — and comparable social-media targets — can now discount for pending patent litigation, giving the plaintiff leverage that scales with the target's exit timeline rather than the merits of the claim.
Third-order effects
- If suits of this shape keep clearing the filing threshold, holding broad legacy software patents becomes a business model aimed at exit-stage companies, pushing the consumer web industry toward lobbying for patent reform and defensive pooling.
- The pattern feeds the growing split between operating companies that patent what they build and non-practicing entities that litigate what others build — a structural fault line regulators and courts were already being asked to address.
The trend: Litigation by holders of broad, legacy software patents is hardening into a routine transaction cost for consumer web companies, timed to matter most when those companies are raising or selling.