We may not have heard much about patent licensing firm Lodsys in recent months, but independent app developers are still working together to fight the patent bully. The Appsterdam Legal Defense team—a growing group of developers from various mobile platforms pooling their ideas and resources to fight back against Lodsys—has continued to take steps to protect themselves from the kind of litigation brought by Lodsys and its apparent parent company Intellectual Ventures since they formed in August. But although progress has been made over the last five months, there's still a long way to go before indie devs feel protected.

Lodsys began its war against independent and third-party iOS developers in the first part of 2011, soon expanding its targets to Android developers and beyond. The firm accused them of infringing on an in-app purchasing patent that, at least on the iOS side, was made available to developers via Apple's own APIs. As it turns out, Apple already pays for a license for the technology in question through an agreement with the patent's original holder, a company called Intellectual Ventures—a firm that conveniently avoids questions about its relationship to Lodsys, but appears to have direct ties. The agreement with Apple, however, didn't stop Lodsys from a legal assault on small-scale developers in an apparent attempt to bully them into settlements.

That's what sparked developer Mike Lee to organize the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team in August, whose stated goal was to be "the ants of East Texas, minding their business until someone invades their anthill." With the help of intellectual property attorney Michael McCoy, the group put out a call for developers of all kinds—iOS, Android, or otherwise—to join them and unite in the common goal of being free of patent litigation and taking down Intellectual Ventures. And although the group has remained somewhat quiet since then, there has been a fair amount of behind-the-scenes activity.

"We've been quite active since forming the Appsterdam Legal Defense Team and launching Operation Anthill," Lee told Ars via e-mail. The group held a legal summit in October with both US and Dutch patent attorneys on hand to answer developer questions for two days, compiling hours of videos to post online for other app makers who are concerned about patent threats.

"We took that dreaded first step of taking a demand letter from Lodsys to an attorney, going through it, and formulating a plan about what to do, stressing the need to either retain your own counsel or contact us so we can be your counsel," Lee said. "We also formulated a global plan by partnering with a company called ArticleOne to perform a million-seat global crowd-sourced prior art search. This, combined with donations to the Legal Defense Fund, will let us file a re-examination request, which will get everyone off the hook for a while, and hopefully end with the patents being declared invalid."

The messages from the summit were strong—"These guys are relying on us to roll over," Lee told the crowd in October during a session called "Surviving Extortion"—but the team made it clear that they believe the developer community needs to unite if they want to fight this kind of legal threat. "Even if Apple were to step up and do more than they're doing... that's not necessarily going to help Android developers or PC developers, and those people are getting demand letters too," McCoy added. "There's no one who isn't affected by this."

Indeed, the team has made some less-than-exciting discoveries while putting together its defense strategy. "We analyzed the ubiquitous criminal nature of these companies," Lee told Ars. "There is nothing you can do to prevent yourself from being targeted, regardless of platform, and regardless of how careful you are, because this is not patent infringement, it is simple extortion, and it is worldwide."

Such a realization only solidifies the stance that Lee took when we spoke with him in August—that there appears to only be two options for developers: "Join us, or wait to be next." As we enter into 2012, it looks like independent app developers for all platforms have some legal work ahead of them—especially if they want to take down the patents owned by Lodsys and Intellectual Ventures.