Shipping and Transit LLC, a company that claims to have patented both the tracking of vehicles and the packages they deliver, has been hit with an order (PDF) to pay $36,317.50 in attorney's fees.

US Magistrate Judge Dave Lee Brannon, who published the order yesterday, is the second federal judge to hit Shipping and Transit with fees in less than a week. It could be the beginning of the end for the patent-holding company, which has filed several hundred patent infringement lawsuits over the course of about a decade.

Shipping and Transit's lawsuit against Lensdiscounters.com, an online contact-lens store, followed a familiar pattern. The patent-holding company sent a demand letter to LensDiscounters in March, saying that its use of "Shipping Tracking Alerts" infringed several of its patents. Those alerts are nothing more than e-mails to customers allowing them to access package-tracking software that's made not by LensDiscounters but by UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

Shipping and Transit lawyers asked for a licensing payment of $45,000 to be paid by April 28. In June, still unpaid, they filed suit.

Instead of paying for a license, as most defendants have, LensDiscounters lawyered up and filed a response and counterclaims.

At that point, Shipping and Transit just dropped its case—something it has done many times over the year. The patent claims asserted against LensDiscounters were used in at least 315 cases of now-closed litigation, not a single one of which was evaluated on the merits.

The fees award, granted to LensDiscounters on Tuesday, is the second one to be levied against Shipping and Transit. It comes just days after the first award, granted to a Minnesota logistics company last week

In the order published Tuesday, the judge found that Shipping and Transit's explanation for why it dropped its lawsuit—that it found that four of the five shippers used already had full or partial licenses to the Shipping and Transit patents—didn't hold water. Those shippers were already listed on the defendant's website.

"Nothing revealed in the initial discovery could bear on the post-discovery decision that the case was not worth pursuing as to the USPS shipments or notifications," wrote Brannon. "It is more likely that, from the inception, Plaintiff never intended to litigate its patent infringement rights as they relate to Defendant's use of the USPS to ship its products."

He continues:

Perhaps most telling, when the validity of the patents was challenged, Plaintiff routinely and promptly filed a covenant not to sue to end any inquiry. Just so in this case. In this Court's view, a plaintiff that genuinely seeks to invoke its protection rights under the Patent Act would eagerly litigate the validity issue, at least once, so a decision on the merits would emerge. That has not occurred in any of the hundreds of cases that Plaintiff has filed.

The order comes from a magistrate judge, meaning that the district court judge who oversees the litigation still needs to approve it.

"However, it represents yet another finding by a court that Shipping & Transit’s patent infringement lawsuits are exceptional and should lead to an award of fees to defendants," wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Vera Ranieri, who hailed the decision in an EFF blog post titled "The Death Knell is Tolling for Shipping & Transit LLC."

The patents owned by Shipping and Transit originated with a man named Martin Kelly Jones, who invented a system called "BusCall" in the early '90s. When the business didn't succeed, Jones moved the patents into a company called ArrivalStar. Jones and his lawyers have collected patent-license payments from more than 800 companies since. The current patent-holding entity, Shipping and Transit, was formed in 2015.

An attorney for Shipping and Transit referred questions on the matter to Peter Sirianni, who is a shareholder in the company. Sirianni referred Ars to Jones via e-mail. Jones didn't immediately respond, but we will update the post if he does.

An attorney for LensDiscounters also didn't respond to a request for comment.

More on ArrivalStar and the Jones patents:

In 2012, ArrivalStar became an innovator in the world of patent assertion by suing cash-strapped American cities.

In June 2013, the American Public Transit Association (APTA) sued ArrivalStar to invalidate its patents.

In August 2013, ArrivalStar backed down and reached a deal to stop suing transit agencies.

In 2014, the company cemented its place as the nation's most litigious patent troll of the previous year.

In July 2016, Unified Patents filed challenges to the Jones patents.

Later that year, Jones and his patent-licensing operation were profiled in The Wall Street Journal (October 2016).