Two years ago, Lodsys began sending letters to iOS developers, demanding that they pay 0.575 percent of revenues to license patents on in-app purchasing and upgrades. Apple fought back, saying that Lodsys wasn’t entitled to any revenue from individual developers because Apple had already paid to license the technology in question.
Now U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap has thrown out Apple’s challenge and instead ruled that Lodsys can settle independently with each of the developers it sued.
The App Developers Alliance and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are complaining loudly that the court should have at least considered Apple’s position. “Lodsys’s pattern of sending out demand letters, suing a seemingly random sampling of app developers and then settling with those app developers, promises that those developers’ claims of a right to use the technology in question will never be heard,” wrote EFF attorney Daniel Nazer. “The resulting uncertainty leaves developers in limbo. In fact, there have been reports that app developers are indeed pulling apps out of the U.S. markets entirely.”
