Shipping and Transit, LLC is a company that has spent more than a decade filing patent lawsuits against big businesses, public transport systems, and one-man software companies. Now for the first time, the organization has been ordered to pay the legal fees of one of the companies it sued.

A federal judge has ordered (PDF) Shipping and Transit—formerly known as ArrivalStar, also known as Melvino Technologies—to pay legal fees to Logistics Planning Services (LPS), a Minnesota freight logistics company.

Shipping and Transit's business model "involves filing hundreds of patent infringement lawsuits, mostly against small companies, and leveraging the high cost of litigation to extract settlements for amounts less than $50,000," wrote US District Judge Andrew Guilford in his order, published Wednesday. "These tactics present a compelling need for deterrence and to discourage exploitative litigation by patentees who have no intention of testing the merits of their claims."

Shipping and Transit sued LPS last year, claiming the company violated three related US patents, numbered 6,415,207, 6,763,299 and 6,904,359, the third of which has been asserted in more than 400 cases.

This patent-holding company typically asks for licensing fees in the $10,000 to $25,000 range, according to its lawyers' statements in court. LPS wouldn't pay and chose to litigate the case instead. At that point, Shipping and Transit dropped the case and tried to walk away. LPS filed a motion asking for fees, claiming that Shipping and Transit had pursued an "objectively unreasonable" case and litigated it unreasonably.

The judge agreed. He went ahead and analyzed Shipping and Transit's patents despite the company's dismissal, finding that claims in all three patents are "directed to an abstract idea of monitoring and reporting the location of a vehicle."

"[C]laim 14 is written so broadly that it could cover the activities of everyone from taxi dispatchers to warehouse delivery coordinators to bike messengers to hotel bellboys," wrote Judge Guilford. "At best, all of the asserted claims of the Patents-in-Suit are directed to implementing an abstract idea using generic computer components."

The judge wrote that the patents wouldn't pass muster under Section 101 of the patent laws, which bars the patenting of abstract ideas, but his order does not invalidate Shipping and Transit's patents since the case had been dismissed earlier.

Judge Guilford also found the plaintiff's business model "troubling," since the company kept dismissing lawsuits to avoid a ruling on the merits, "yet persists in filing new lawsuits advancing the same claims." He continued:

Plaintiff has filed similar lawsuits (more than 90 for the ’207 and ’297 Patents and more than 400 for the ’359 Patent) against countless defendants. Patent litigation is expensive, so it is unsurprising that the vast majority of accused infringers choose to settle early rather than expend the resources required to show a court that the Patents-in-Suit fail under § 101. When the few challenges do occur, however, they are promptly met with voluntary dismissals with prejudice, as in this case.

Shipping and Transit is facing at least two other fee motions, according to lawyers familiar with the company's litigations. If those are successful as well, persistent defendants could finally shake up the company's business model.

The company is also facing an Inter Partes Review challenge in the US Patent Office, brought by Unified Patents, a company that specializes in challenging problematic patents at the USPTO. The EFF has also deemed Shipping and Transit an incorrigible "patent troll" and took on a case last year seeking to take out that company's patents.

The next step in this current situation is for LPS to file supporting documents for its requested attorney fee. At the end of his order, Judge Guilford suggests both sides could agree on a $20,000 award to avoid a dispute over the fees.

"I am very pleased with the result and with the Court’s thorough written opinion," Geoff Godfrey, defense lawyer for LPS, told Ars.

Lawyers for Shipping and Transit didn't respond to a request for comment.

Shipping and Transit patents originated with Martin Kelly Jones, who invented a system called "BusCall" in the early '90s. When the business failed, he moved the patents into a company called ArrivalStar. Jones and his lawyers have collected patent-license payments from more than 800 companies since. In 2015, the patents were handed off to a new entity, Shipping and Transit LLC.

In some years, organizations that track patent litigation have found that ArrivalStar was the single most litigious patent-holding company in the US.

"We are one of the pioneers of determining when something is arriving and being able to message that out," Jones said last year in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Prior Ars Technica coverage on ArrivalStar and the Jones patents: