<blockquote>In the case, the EDTX jury on Bedrock Computer Technologies, LLC vs. Google, Inc., awarded Bedrock $5 million. That’s chump change by patent troll standards, but Bedrock has also sued, among others, Yahoo!, MySpace, Amazon, PayPal, Match.com and AOL There’s money in those companies and Bedrock wants it!

Their justification? That the company’s crap patent, Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data is violated by Red Hat in its Linux products.</blockquote>
via <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/idiotic-anti-linux-google-patent-decision/8736">Idiotic Anti-Linux &amp; Google Patent Decision | ZDNet</a>.

Hopefully this is the straw that starts real reform of the patent system.  Here's another article on this issue.