Rackspace is more focussed on having the patents declared invalid than hurting the troll any other way. Eventually you'd run out of patents that are even remotely defensible, because they would have to have been filed long before HDFS became as ubiquitous as it is.
Ah thanks. Thank makes much more sense, esp in light of Newegg's recent victory along those exact lines: "How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125770
Right, but a patent X can only be used to attack technology Y if X predates Y. So once all the pre-Y patents have been struck down you're a lot safer. Even though X might be a totally unoriginal patent, if it predates the technology it's attacking, it might still be hard to defend against. Strike down the patent and it's done - and you cnan't assign another patent in the past.
Technologies continue changing. Your core technology may be older, but if you've integrated with some recent Z, you can still be attacked by patent X, even though your core technology is older.
Look at Apple for instance. It is older than all of the patents it is being sued with. Many of the lawsuits that it faces are for cases where the patent is younger than Apple's technology. Apple still gets sued for it though.
