Linux Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat/Novell 473
walterbyrd writes "Just months after the last nail in SCO's case, and on the same day as Red Hat's brave words about patent intimidation, a company filed the first patent suit against the Linux operating system. IP Innovation LLC filed the claim against Red Hat and Novell over U.S. Patent No. 5,072,412. PJ points out there is prior art here: 'You might recall the patent was used in litigation against Apple in April 2007, and Beta News reported at the time that it's a 1991 Xerox PARC patent. But Ars Technica provided the detail that it references earlier patents going back to 1984.'"
"...filled against Linux" (Score:5, Informative)
Saved me some effort (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Its about time! (Score:5, Informative)
PJ points out no such thing (Score:5, Informative)
An Acacia subsidiary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe.
IP Innovation LLC is a subsidiary of Acacia, and Acacia recently appointed Brad Brunell, who worked for 16 years at Microsoft as general manager, intellectual property licensing. He's now a senior vice president. Other ex-Microsoft executives have also recently migrated to Acacia.
Acacia are known as patent trolls.
Re:An Acacia subsidiary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Start of a patent war? (Score:3, Informative)
What I have found, though, is astounding. Acacia has sued hundreds of defendants in 213 different patent lawsuits brought by 36 different Acacia subsidiaries. That's right - they have sued in 36 different names! By doing so, Acacia, a publicly traded company, has increased its market cap by tenfold, going from a 35M company in early 2003 to a 350M company today.
This company doesn't make anything, it is a patent troll pure and simple.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:2, Informative)
(All the more so, because one of the companies Microsoft cut a deal with for patent lawsuit protection, Novel, is also named in this lawsuit)
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:5, Informative)
Gerry
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But wait... (Score:3, Informative)
They only pay money if MS generates them new revenue.
Anybody remember "Sidekick" for DOS? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course Sun had stuff that predates this too. Their Open Look Window Manager (olwm) was around for quite a while before this. Olwm was the first window manager that I used under Linux too. That would have been in 1991 or so which may or may not pre-date the patent.
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This space for rent
Re:Its about time! (Score:3, Informative)
Because Oracle distributes an exact clone of Red Hat linux. If it the court finds that Red Hat infringes on the patent, then Oracle is in the exact same boat. And that boat is: paying big bucks to the patent troll.
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:2, Informative)
sol ~ # eix links
* www-client/links
Available versions: 2.1_pre26:2 2.1_pre28-r1:2
Installed: none
Homepage: http://links.twibright.com/ [twibright.com]
Description: links is a fast lightweight text and graphic web-browser
Found 5 matches.
sol ~ # eix lynx
* www-client/lynx
Available versions: 2.8.6-r1 2.8.6-r2
Installed: 2.8.6-r1
Homepage: http://lynx.browser.org/ [browser.org]
Description: An excellent console-based web browser with ssl support
sol ~ #
Re:Connection with M$ (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Informative)
In other words (quoting again, this time from the description): "A display system object can be linked to more than one workspace, to provide a respective tool in each of those workspaces. If the user provides signals causing a switch from one of those workspaces to another, the respective tools share features so that the user perceives them as the same tool, and the state of the display system object maintains continuity."
Simply speaking, it is illustrated (I think) by the multiple workspaces in Gnome, coupled with the ability to right click on a running window on the task panel and designate the window as "Always on Top". So, it appears to be (indeed, IS) the "same tool" as you switch from one workspace to the next.
Looks like this is not specific to Red Hat and Novell, although it might be an easy workaround to disable this feature if necessary.
Re:Anybody remember "Sidekick" for DOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't X11 itself prior art? (Score:3, Informative)
There was also a company called 3 Rivers Systems (I think) that was selling windows based machines somewhat before the Lisa was demonstrated. I just googled it - it was called the PERQ and appears to have come out in 1979, so looks like they had been around a while when I saw one. They were way ahead of what the Lisa could do, BTW. This may not be prior art because it seems the designer came out of Xerox Parc but it could also mean that it produces a timeliness of filing defense.
BTW, isn't there law or case law about defending patents in a timely manner? Can someone comment on how that applies here?
you can invalidate your own patent.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:By this you will know... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I First Encountered CDE in 1987 (Score:2, Informative)
Obvious Prior Art? (Score:2, Informative)
Solaris CDE was announced in 1983 and is much older than this patent.
The 1980's vintage 512K Macs had something called a desktop switcher, which allowed flipping between multiple workspaces. (I used this as well)
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt&showcomments=1 [folklore.org]
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, after hearing that Acacia has anything to do with this, I am not surprised at all. I worked in the distance education department for a University a few years back. At that time, they were making rounds among the education industry, and sending letters asking for several hundred thousand dollars, or 5% of all profits made from a series of patents.
The patents? "A system of distributing video and/or audio information employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression" over cable, tv, telephone, and as they were implying, the internet. Their claim was that anyone streaming video or sound needed to pay up. I mean, honestly, transferring compressed data over a medium!? And of course they didn't go after larger University's that flat out told them they wouldn't pay...
Acacia is one of those companies at the bottom of the barrel. Even worse than SCO, because their whole business is suing over patents, like NTP.
Here is the link if anyone's interested: http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=8559&c=13 [streamingmedia.com]
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:3, Informative)
Heck - Linux version 0.12 had virtual consoles circa 1992 ( around the time this thing was filed.)
It was old technology then.
What about green screens? (Score:1, Informative)
This is a non-issue (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/934549/000101968707002404/acacia_10q-063007.htm [sec.gov]
* According to the SEC filings, Acacia had in the quarter ending in June 36 pending lawsuits against a number of companies (in each case they sue a number of companies, not only one).
* On that same filing they report revenues for the quarter of 5.8 million dollars.
* I counted the number of settlements for a 3-month period from their main web page, they settled with 47 defendants for July, August and September (not the same covered by the SEC, but I went just by what was reported).
* In the June 30th period they had Novell listed as a company they were suing over some portable device patent together with 23 other defendants (H&R Block Digital Tax Solutions, LLC, F/K/A H&R Block Digital Tax Solutions, Inc., Block Financial Corporation, Riverdeep, Inc., Oracle Corporation, SAP America, Inc. d/b/a SAP Americas, SAP AG, Bentley Systems, Inc., SPSS, Inc., Solidworks Corporation, Sonic Solutions, Corel Corporation, Corel, Inc., MISYS PLC, Adtran, Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, CA, Inc., UGS Corp., Business Objects Americas, Business Objects SA, Trend Micro Incorporated (California Corporation), EMC Corporation, Borland Software Corporation, Novell, Inc., Compuware Corporation and Avid Technology, Inc).
* There is a press release on their site that states that they settled with Novell on August 30th for this claim.
This means that Acacia is extracting on average 100,000 dollars per company they sue (5 millions divided by the number of settlements). Give or take depending on the fees from their lawyers (which are a million dollars). They spend more money keeping their patents alive than that and are operating at a loss right now (see the SEC filing).
To put things in perspective, getting a legal team in place and sending them to the courthouse would likely have a cost of 20,000 dollars just by showing up at the trial. This is with zero to no research on the case done. If you do some research, get external council and a little bit more, a defendant will probably be spending much more than 100,000 dollars by the time they show up in court.
This is probably why they pretty much settle with everyone, they are minor nuisance; They are a pest, and they have found a niche market where they can extort money from companies without going to court.
The patent is likely bogus, the patent would probably be thrown out of court, it would have no impact on Linux, but my bet is that Novell and Red Hat will settle out of court just because of the economics of it.
tf64
Re:Interesting. (Score:1, Informative)
tf64
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:3, Informative)
This patent seems to involve multiple desktops in a GUI environment and the first implementation of that that I recall was olvwm from Sun Micro. I don't think olwm, the single desktop predecessor of olvwm came that early. HP's Vu (spelling?) might have had multiple desktops by 1989ish, but I don't remember. CDE (which merged HP, DEC, and Sun's X11 environments) has the same feature.
Regardless, this is not a "Linux" Patent Infringement. Sun, DEC and HP were doing it on their proprietary versions of Unix first, so it's a GUI thing. Sun and HP still survive. Perhaps they should have started suing there.