It's nice to see. But SHIELD lacks a critical element: allowing the defendant to specify the jurisdiction. Otherwise every patent case will still be fought in troll-friendly East Texas.
Yes, it does seem reasonable to allow the defendant more choice on where they have to go to court.
Is there some hack around the East Texas problem? If you don't sell your product in that area, would it be possible to avoid being brought to that district's court? If so, I could imagine companies could simply have a notice on their checkout page: "Sorry, you live in East Texas, we don't sell there". I'm sure some companies would not want to leave money on the table like that, but for many things I do, I'd be happy to take such a position.
I would really love for someone knowledgeable to comment on this. I'd never even thought about blocking customers in Eastern Texas. I just compared a map of my users to a map of the texas districts (http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/images/divisions/texasdistrictm...) and I'm pretty sure that out of my 2000 paying users, not a single one falls in that district. It seems to just miss Houston and Dallas.
If blocking IPs that originate from that region would offer additional protection from patent trolls, I'd do it in a heart beat. I know that the real answer is "talk to a lawyer" which I will do, but it'd be interesting to see someone from the Hacker News community comment on the viability of this strategy.
I'm not in the US, so I don't know for sure - but I'm pretty sure I heard that the problem with that is that it's a federal district court, so the only way to make it impossible to be tried there is to not sell anywhere in the US.
