Two judges smack down notorious patent holder “Shipping and Transit” in one week

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Shipping and Transit LLC, a company that claims to have patented both the tracking of vehicles and the packages they deliver, has been hit with an order (PDF) to pay $36,317.50 in attorney's fees.

US Magistrate Judge Dave Lee Brannon, who published the order yesterday, is the second federal judge to hit Shipping and Transit with fees in less than a week. It could be the beginning of the end for the patent-holding company, which has filed several hundred patent infringement lawsuits over the course of about a decade.

Shipping and Transit's lawsuit against Lensdiscounters.com, an online contact-lens store, followed a familiar pattern. The patent-holding company sent a demand letter to LensDiscounters in March, saying that its use of "Shipping Tracking Alerts" infringed several of its patents. Those alerts are nothing more than e-mails to customers allowing them to access package-tracking software that's made not by LensDiscounters but by UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

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