In the past, when dealing with patent trolls, Apple has taken an aggressive stance in filing reexams. Will Apple file reexams on the Lodsys patents to support the application developers that were sued?
As detailed with my posts earlier (here, here, and here), there is plenty of prior art out there to put together a high-quality reexam, especially if a company like Apple throws their resources behind the prior art searching. The prior art I posted is the results of myself and a friend searching for only a few hours each; Apple could easily fund a much more comprehensive search and possibly find even better prior art. Most of the large companies sued by Lodsys have likely done prior art searches for invalidity opinions; I wish we could see the prior art they found, but I have not received any responses to such requests yet.
There are a lot of considerations that Apple is likely weighing to determine the amount of support or involvement to provide the sued application developers. For instance, there are issues concerning whether Apple can directly challenge an IV patent (see here), which I do not know the answer to because it depends on the contracts between Apple and IV.
Hopefully Apple jumps in to support the application developers at least with reexam support.
-USPA
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