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.'"
Its about time! (Score:3, Interesting)
If this doesn't stop EU swpatents nothing will (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of people in EU using linux distributions without any legal concerns that would be very damaged the very day that EU suddenly recognizes this troll patent.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like investigating Dell because they sell hard drives that might infringe on a patent [slashdot.org]?
Start of a patent war? (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of things I noticed (Score:4, Interesting)
But this patent was granted to Xerox, NOT "IP Innovation LLC". So why the hell is this 3rd party suing over a patent it wasn't granted?
The content of this patent is given in a language that is so obtuse that I can't tell whether it's describing something that was obvious, or if it's describing a single large virtual desktop, or if it's talking about something completely different than the "workspaces" we're used to seeing today. And I really don't have the time this morning to try deciphering it.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
But wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
So you mean that making a patent deal with Microsoft doesn't really protect Novell from patent infringment suits? Well, isn't that the strangest thing...
I think Novell is about to figure out that no matter how you look at it, they got the short end of the stick in the Microsoft deal. They paid a lot of money so that firms other than Microsoft could sue them for patent infringement. Wonder if they'll just pay off this company like they did Microsoft. Wonder if they can afford to pay off all of the companies that will bring patent infringement suits against them.
What a way to paint a big, red, sue-me-for-patent-infringement-target on their company.
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there is a principle in law (or Equity) that one cannot do indirectly what he cannot do directly. An interesting question for practicing lawyers (I am a retired one and not up on all of this) would be, is there a way to attribute the Plaintiff's actions to Microsoft, canceling their GPL rights? Would it in fact be too late to do this based on their provable support of SCO (the massive loans arranged by MS to keep SCO afloat)? I'd sure like to hear what Eben Moglen has to say about this.
Re:A couple of things I noticed (Score:1, Interesting)
For the sake of IP innovations LLC... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Follow the money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If this doesn't stop EU swpatents nothing will (Score:5, Interesting)
This way EU benefits from the extra tax from companies moving to EU and US might be forced to change their law or face loosing lots of tax dollars.
But then again, I might be dreaming...
Re:Its about time! (Score:1, Interesting)
But (from what I've read others here say) this patent involves GUI that Red Hat is using, not Linux itself. So Linux won't "disappear" regardless. Given that, why would IBM or Oracle care to spend money to protect Red Hat on a patent violation that has nothing to do with Linux? Oracle is a Red Hat *competitor*, BTW. If Red Hat is violating patents, why should Oracle care? Red Hat has announced that they think that they are above the law and have the right to violate patents because they are a member of a patent constortium that will counter sue any patent claims against them. Why would the consortium spend its political capital on Red Hat? The "F-500" ycompanies you speak of can choose a distro that honors patents rather than choosing Red Hat, a company that says that the very idea of honoring patents is beneath them.
Re:Smalltalk (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, citing anything by Xerox PARC as "prior art" isn't going to fly, becuase this patent was originally awarded to the very same Xerox. Somehow this new company obtained the rights to the patent, but you'll have a hard time convincing a judge that Xerox filed for a patent that isn't valid because of their own "prior art".
http://helpredhat.dyndns.org (Score:2, Interesting)
http://helpredhat.dyndns.org/ [dyndns.org]
cu,
Jan
Not to worry, much (Score:3, Interesting)
Reasons not to worry:
I doubt that Microsoft is behind this. It's not one of their patents, and it's a weak claim. If Microsoft does something with patents, it's likely to involve something that has to be Microsoft-compatible, like Samba or Wine.
Re:Follow the money (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to be time for IBM to sell a few hundred patents to a bunch of Patent troll companies, which then sue Microsoft...?
The start of the patent wars seems to be similar to the cold war, when the super powers fought by proxy.
An Abundance of Prior Art (Score:2, Interesting)
There were many academic papers and conferences; ACM SIGGRAPH publications [acm.org] go back to 1967 at least. By the time SIGGRAPH organized, the field of computer graphics was already well-established: many proprietary graphics systems were already in use in private industry and government. Newman and Sproull published their landmark text Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics [amazon.com] in 1973.
Other especially good veins to mine for prior art are satellite imaging software for both government use (spy satellites) and for oil prospecting. Another active area was geophysical processing workstation software. The major oil companies were the non-military non-spy pioneers in these areas.
Re:Interesting. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
Vtwm has had this since at least February 1992. Admittedly that's later than the 1991 patent date, but with some further digging into history, vtwm might stil become prior art. I have memories of using it earlier than that, at least.
In any case, the fact that nobody filed suit against the vtwm developers/distributors for over 15 years shows that the owners for a very long time didn't exploit their patent the way they should have.
Not your fault: "links" is poor name for a project (Score:3, Interesting)
It was because of this that I finally gave up trying to use, get docs for, or otherwise find out more about "links" and switched to elinks [elinks.cz], which is a forked project that's probably just as good, but is a lot easier to find on the web.
If you still want to work with "links", the correct keyword to Google for is "Twibright labs" --but of course, if I had no way of knowing that back when I was searching. And nowadays there's the Wikipedia, too.
Re:Its about time! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is another alternative, which could happen ... all development moves off-shore. Heck, RedHat could just move almost everything to Europe and trade there. (Alan Cox refuses to visit the US because of the stupid software patent issues).
Sell the core system in the US with from RedHat US with no Window Managers, and a link to repositories to download all the Window Managers you want, from software-patent-is-bad countries. Sell the full system everywhere else.
This is just one more step for the US in its continual technological decline. Whole industries are already gone - ram, most hard drives, lcd screens. Why not almost all FLOSS development?
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:2, Interesting)
IANAL, but I'm betting their logic goes something like this:
Of course the time periods involved weaken the argument considerably... but Microsoft's got the resources that such an argument might work.
Re:Follow the money (Score:3, Interesting)
1.) Redhat loses the case, pays big money, Microsoft loses a competitor
2.) Redhat wins the case, patent is invalidated, one less Eolas type threat to Microsoft's bottom line.
Yep, MS is behind of this (Score:5, Interesting)
It all appears MS is making up a new SCO.
A rational question is to ask "why also Novell"? Yes, we all know Novell and MS are buddies and all so this is a reason to think MS is not behind this lawsuit.
Imho what's going to happen is that Novell will be VERY collaborative and willing to accept to pay royalties for this BS patent, the game will be make Red Hat play alone. The expected aftermath (for MS-Novell) would be to make Red Hat look like a rogue company that does not respect IP. And yes, thanks to Novell the case will be much harder to solve for Red Hat than before, probably Novell will rush in making a deal so there's precedent...
Laugh at the ridiculous theory all you want, I just hope Novell does not prove me right on this one. But if they do, then I hope nobody will argue to me whose side Novell is playing for.
Novell cant make a deal. (Score:4, Interesting)
GPL prevents the distrubution without a license that would be passed right along to Redhat and its customers for free. Besided the patent is more about XWindows/KDE/Gnome than it is about Linux. Sun is the one going to be hurting on this; They use Gnome for Solaris and that is GPL'd. They wont be able to ship Solaris without a license that can then be used by everyone for free, even those who are not Sun customers. The Linux kernel doesn't have a workspace interface; thats a userspace program.
Why not unload on the puppet masters? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"...filled against Linux" (Score:1, Interesting)
None here either.
An attempt to fix your quoteSupport the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're angry about this, write your senators and tell them to support S.1145 [loc.gov]. It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.
MS Patent deals, how they play a role in this. (Score:3, Interesting)
A little late (Score:2, Interesting)