Red Hat's Secret Patent Deal 95
Bruce Perens writes "When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia's patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat's next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way? Could the outcome have placed Red Hat in violation of the open-source licenses on its own product?"
Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Insightful)
Copying the first paragraph of TFA, verbatim, does not make a helpful summary.
This is pure speculation on the author's part (Score:4, Insightful)
Mr. Perens has no idea what the terms of the settlement are. No one does, other than the parties and the judge. I don't know what his animus is against Red Hat, but the way this article is written is simply FUD.
Re:This is pure speculation on the author's part (Score:4, Insightful)
We shouldn't allow this kind of secrecy. If it takes FUD to pry open the case, then I'm all for it. Sometimes it takes a sledgehammer to "tear down that wall".
Re:East Texas and IP... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is pure speculation on the author's part (Score:4, Insightful)
The only legitimate reason an agreement must be kept secret is to cover illegal activity
No it isn't. It allows parties to negotiate a deal which is more favorable to one of them than the other usually gives to most people, without causing everyone who the second party negotiates with in the future to demand the same deal.
Re:Information wants to be free (Score:3, Insightful)
Post your Bank Account & PIN and find out ... ;-)
I think he is referring to the difficulty of maintaining control. You are misdirecting the argument to focus on the wording, "want" and "free". Any person that hesitates at posting their account and pin proving the op's point. They don't know how the information is going to be used and distributed. There is a huge number of anti fraud laws and people still get taken for a trip everyday. I would say that makes it hard to lock up information. It gets worse for people that want to sell the information as the more people that know the more likely it is to get distributed. It is like a spontaneous entropic process that is irreversible. Distribution and reuse is going to happen, you are fighting an uphill battle if you want to control it, and it is never going to be like before when the information didn't exist.
Re:East Texas and IP... (Score:2, Insightful)
Can decisions be labeled as bad if the majority of the public believes them to be bad? Such can be argued for this E. Texas Court.
Define "majority of the public". "Majority of the programmer crowd", maybe. "Majority of the country", not a chance. Not when most people don't honestly care about this situation and the real consequences from it are shielded in the form of a slight rate increase to some service or product they use (an increase which they're all used to anyway by now).
Re:Don't ask don't tell (Score:4, Insightful)
I think maybe (parts of) the community might not want to know.
You too, Brutus?
Exactly, and the Judge enforcing a huge NDA over the discussion has probably abrogated the rights of some third party to discover violations of their IP or leave them twisting in the wind waiting to be sued by patent trolls for an infringement that they are totally unaware of.
Did Red Hat essentially win the case, but can't tell anyone so that the patent trolls can continue to collect royalties on invalid patents?
Did Red Hat lose the case and thereby violate the GPL and be at risk of losing their entire business?
Maybe we need Judicial Impact statements in this country. Especially when the subject at hand affects the rights of non participants.
Re:Don't ask don't tell (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, "I have some code on my machine that I worked on in 1979" is never prior art because there is no proof you didn't write it yesterday and backdate it. It has to be published or findable in a library or otherwise dateable. It's sometimes pretty hard to find prior art even for obvious things, because people don't usually write and store documents on obvious things.
Re:This is pure speculation on the author's part (Score:3, Insightful)
The most likely reason they settled is because the law was clear and both parties knew what would happen if they went to trial.
The most likely reason they did not release the details is that releasing the details hinders the parties ability to deal with 3rd parties.
The most likely reason everyone else gets upset about this is because they are the 3rd party and want whatever advantage the 2 settling parties are holding by keeping it secret.
Its possible only one party benefits directly from the secret, but in that case they certainly paid the other party in the settlement agreement or it would not be secret.
Re:Wrong on so many levels (Score:1, Insightful)
The point is he is engaging in hysterics ("Red Hat’s Secret Patent Deal and the Fate of JBoss Developers").
The fate of JBoss Developers before the settlement: you may be sued at any time by some company holding some patent that vaguely resembles something like what you are doing.
The fate of JBoss Developers after the settlement: you may be sued at any time by some company holding some patent that vaguely resembles something like what you are doing.
Re:This is pure speculation on the author's part (Score:4, Insightful)
What difference does it make if the agreement is made before or after they file the lawsuit?
Before a lawsuit is filed, we have two parties talking nicely trying to work out their differences. By filing suit, one of the parties is bringing the State into the dispute. They are asking that the State use force, or threat thereof, to resolve the dispute according to their wishes.
This is a necessary and useful service, since not all disputes can be resolved amicably. However, the dispute is no longer a private matter between two parties - it has become a public matter. Citizens have a compelling interest in seeing that all operations of the State are conducted as transparently as possible. Allowing a public matter to be settled in secret is the very opposite of transparency.