PersonalWeb

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at CERN, invented the World Wide Web as we know it. When he created it, he could have chosen a path wherein the Web would have remained under his control. Instead, he chose to share his work with the world. Thanks to that decision, the standards behind the Web are free to all [..]But now and then an individual, a nation, or a company decides that this should not be the case. Today that company is PersonalWeb, a shell company from the Eastern District of Texas, which has set out on a course of patent litigation against some of the largest Internet companies in an attempt to claim the Web as their own.In December of 2011 they filed a series of suits against Amazon, Caringo, EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and NetApp regarding a bevy of software patents they partially hold.They have followed this action up recently with even more lawsuits, this time against the likes of Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They even accidentally sued Rackspace, a company that merely hosts Github, the company they were actually trying to assault.For several years, now, through our campaign to end software patents, we have been warning people that a day would come when simply running a Web site could subject you to a ruinous patent lawsuit. It appears that this day has come.