Blocking business seems like an unusual step, or at least we rarely hear about it in the news. Is there any precedent for a patent case successfully blocking a business whose service is all on a website? If so, what happened? Did they simply take over the domain? What if a business used a foreign owned domain?
I feel like there are options here that may not have been tried. Presumably a patent troll could try to tell your payment service and US based servers not to do business with you, but I haven't heard of that either, aside from credit card companies blocking Wikileaks and the US govt seizing servers suspected of hosting illegal stuff. I forgot why the US govt seized servers in VA a few years back but the point is that is pretty unusual too and I wonder how far a patent troll would go or how difficult it would be for them to get through all that.
The only way China blocks Facebook, for example, is through a massive firewall, and their businesses generally don't accept any foreign credit cards. The US seems unlikely to put in a huge firewall or modify DNSs to go after small businesses for patent trolls..
Wikileaks is based in Sweden and was seen as threatening by the US govt.
Companies that settle out of court are, from what I have read, small to medium sized US based companies that can face legal action if they do nothing.
What I am talking about is a small company that is foreign based in a place that does not comply with US patents. Has there been one that has ignored US patents and been shut down by having their domain blocked or their US payments disallowed?
If you're doing software as a service and you can deal with latency issues, you can operate many places where US patent law doesn't apply to you or to your customers. Canada and Mexico have high speed connections to the USA and Germany or Korea aren't so slow either.
"... seeking ... an injunction against AppDynamics prohibiting the infringement of CA Technologies patents"
In case CA wins, the court will prohibit AppDynamics to sell any product that violate CA's patents.
Yes, one may host the company in Canada. How to sell to US customers though? VISA, MC and AMEX all have US presence and will comply with the court order (CA's lawyers will undoubtfully provide a copy). Paypal and other various Stripes are just facades to the very same VISA et all.
Without ability to charge for the product, where the business is going to be?
So we has just established that not only hardware companies are at risk. Good.
Now, step two: US trolls will not sue a company doing business outside of US; too much trouble. But any company doing business in US is a subject to local laws, and most SaaS companies want to work on US market simply because it is the biggest one.
"Doing business in US" means, among other things, having US customers and using US payment processors.
It doesn't matter where you're located. What matters where you want to do business.