Tactical Shift Put Patent Firms on Political Radar

Big technology companies like Cisco Systems and Google have been griping for years about "patent trolls," or companies that buy up patents to make money from them through licensing and litigation. But the White House and Congress started taking patent firms seriously, said people close to the push for a crackdown, only after some of the firms took aim at a different target: retailers and their customers.

"When the trolls started going after mom-and-pop coffee shops, community banks, fast-food restaurants, that's what put this on the radar," said Van Lindberg, the vice president of Rackspace Hosting Inc., a San Antonio cloud-computing company and member of a tech coalition that lobbied Congress and the White House. The letters sent shock waves through the retail industry, said Mallory Duncan, general counsel at the National Retail Federation. "Most retailers aren't technologists," he said. "They know about as much about the technology that goes into their cash register as you and I do about the technology in our cellphones."