This is mostly bad, but I can see three bits of good news in the mess: 1. Litigating against so many companies will take time. Likely the first patent will hav

This is mostly bad, but I can see three bits of good news in the mess: 1. Litigating against so many companies will take time. Likely the first patent will have expired long before the current cases have finished. I doubt they'll have too much more time to sue people, so it's not likely to affect companies any of us start. 2. The validity of the second 2004 patent that discusses AJAX and makes claims that would hurt most of the companies named has not as far as I can tell yet been tested in a court. It's possible that the plugin patent was valid, and the AJAX one is not. If so, the danger to us is much less. 3. The more big companies are hurt by patent trolling, the more effort they'll likely spend on trying to reform the system. We'll see how it goes.