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] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

via How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail | Ars Technica.

The first patent troll story of the new year.  I like Newegg.  If I didn’t live so close to a brick and mortar Microcenter I’d probably use them a lot.