Quite. The law is the law and Kodak are as entitled to use it as anyone else, in fact my main problem is that they have greater access to it due to their wealth but that's another subject altogether. Why should the law be suspended just because the world has moved on and everybody now feels they are free to take advantage of a photographers work just because it's on the net?
Let's not confuse this case with copyright or the (claimed) erosion of photographers' rights. The case in question has
nothing to do with those. It's all about patent law.
As David said,
patent trolling has become a lucrative business for many companies. Far-reaching software patents especially are highly controversial for a good reason, as many of them arguably require only trivial knowledge to create. Perhaps the most notorious case is where
Amazon successfully patented one-click ordering (as opposed to doing it in two or three clicks) in the US, but were rejected in Europe.
I haven't read the Kodak patents in question, so it's hard to say if they are as ridiculously broad and trivial. That will be for the courts to decide - or most likely a basis for the size of the ranso... settlement Google et al will have to pay.