Red Hat Paid $4.2m To Settle Patent Suit 48
An anonymous reader writes "'Red Hat paid $US4.2 million to settle a patent infringement suit brought against it by FireStar Software, an intellectual property activist claims. Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago, said he had dug up a court filing that showed the payment had been made.' Mueller says the payment made by Red Hat was kept secret but news about it surfaced in another suit."
There's nothing here to see people (Score:1, Insightful)
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
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If you RTFA it points out that Red Hat and Eben Moglen claimed that paying the money was compatible with the GPL, yet also told the European Commission that only royalty-free standards are compatible with the GPL. Which contradicts themselves.
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If you RTFA you'd see that it was authored by Florian Mueller and that there is nothing wrong with what happened.
GPL says that if the settlement makes terms incompatible with the GPL, then you cannot distribute. It has nothing to do with the patent settlement terms which are unknown and/or the fact that this doesn't mean it's paying royalties on a standard.
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If Red Hat's FAQ is correct the patent license applies to all derivative works ... so there is a royaltee free license.
"All products distributed under a Red Hat brand are covered, as well as upstream predecessor versions of those products. In addition, derivative works of or combination products using covered products are protected from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products."
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If Red Hat's FAQ is correct the patent license applies to all derivative works ... so there is a royaltee free license.
"All products distributed under a Red Hat brand are covered, as well as upstream predecessor versions of those products. In addition, derivative works of or combination products using covered products are protected from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products."
That's actually a pretty interesting strategy for the pro-patent people -- provide a royalty-free license for anyone distributing software under a copyleft license, but charge royalties to proprietary software makers and hardware companies. Then you get network effects from free software using it and you still get to levy a tax on Microsoft and Apple.
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It is not clear why this approach is not tried more, by legitimate patents. For instance MPEG-LA could pretty much decimate the opposition to H264 by granting a royalty-free license to any software where the source is included (or any similar method they can think of where the purpose is to clearly make distribution of the codec with a Linux distribution possible).
It is possible they have thought of this, but would like it even better if RedHat or Canonical or somebody coughs up a ransom payment like this.
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It is possible they have thought of this, but would like it even better if RedHat or Canonical or somebody coughs up a ransom payment like this.
The problem there is that they only get one payment, so it's a collective action problem. RedHat doesn't want to be the only one paying and then have Canonical, Novell and everybody else benefit from it or vice versa, so they just each refuse to include H.264 in the default install so that they can't be sued over it. And if they're not infringing the patents because they don't include it, MPEG-LA can't just pick one and force them to take a license for everybody.
Also, MPEG-LA isn't your typical patent licen
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, you lose 1 IQ point for every minute before you realise that it's by Florian Mueller (who made a name for himself on Slashdot for repeatedly posting incorrect and inflammatory posts, and is now using an anonymous sock puppet because even the dim editors have learned to reject his posts by now).
Only royalty-free standards are compatible with the GPL. A one-off payment by Red Hat to the patent holder for a non-revokable, sublicenseable, patent license is not. Neither is buying the patent outright and granting everyone the right to use it. The GPL prevents you from imposing any additional requirements on downstream recipients (for example, requiring them from to buy a patent license from you or a third party), but it does not prevent you from imposing conditions on yourself (for example, requiring you to buy or license all of the relevant patents and license them to everyone downstream).
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Yes, because that really set him apart from the rest of the posters here in a very visible way.
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I got to admit, I laughed.
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If you RTFA, you lose 1 IQ point for every minute before you realise that it's by Florian Mueller....
It took you *that* long? I didn't need to read any further than the first pargraph of the summary:
Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago...
I might have an unfair advantage, however, since I used to work with him. Fortunately, it wasn't very long -- just long enough to figure out that:
1. It's all about Florian. (Always.)
2. If it's about Florian, it started with Florian. (Not always, but more often than not.)
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It only contradicts if one presumes Red Hat is isolated from all other businesses on the planet. The reality is, responsible business frequently understand paying legalized extortion is frequently cheaper than a protracted legal battle forced by an extremely broken legal system.
The simply fact is, you know your legal system is extremely broken when the rule of thumb is its cheaper to pay extortion than it is it enter the legal system to not pay said extortion.
Pragmatically, Red Hat paying this only means th
Comment removed (Score:3)
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I entirely agree that corporations should be discouraged from trolling is fine, but going after individuals and their families is hardly very "nice". Justice is good, but vigilante justice is a potentially slippery slope. Having said that, if Anonymous are going to hassle people, they should hassle these fuckers from time to time too.
Why was it kept secret? (Score:1)
Does Red Hat own any software patents itself? Surely if it is against the idea of software patents then it would be in its interest to show the wider software community what it has been driven to (if that is how it feels)? Or was it worried that defending itself would be long and complex, and would be ashamed to admit that it gave in? Perhaps it did not want to attract too much anti-patent campaigning, as this might scare away some of its bigger clients?
It would also be interesting to see what efforts were
Re:Why was it kept secret? (Score:4, Informative)
Does Red Hat own any software patents itself?
Yes. They even have a whole page [redhat.com] about patents:
One defense against such misuse is to develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. Many software companies, both open source and proprietary, pursue this strategy. In the interests of our company and in an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to adopt this same stance. We do so reluctantly because of the perceived inconsistency with our stance against software patents; however, prudence dictates this position.
At the same time, Red Hat will continue to maintain its position as an open source leader and dedicated participant in open source collaboration by extending the promise set forth below.
lawsuit settlement != royalties (Score:4, Interesting)
Known troll ... (Score:3, Informative)
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Oh god and the post above me was done anonymously too... Florian is everywhere!!!!
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I don't think that would affect the supposed "evidence" that has been bandied about in public, which *was* thoroughly debunked as the OP claimed.
And let's not forget, SCO vs IBM/Novell etc. is STILL going on nearly 10 years later with not a shred of evidence that anything copyright-infringement-wise actually came close to happening like they said it did.
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Settlement != loss in court. Let's pretend we're companies. I'm an Open Source company and I'm using some tech you claim to have patented. You sue me. I have two possible responses. Fight you and risk losing, or settle with you. You offer me the following terms: Pay me some relatively trivial amount of money, and I will make a legally binding promise that I will never sue you or anyone involved in using this tech again. So basically, for less money that it would cost me to fight you I not only get y
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Except Red Hat probably isn't even the primary (theoretical) infringer here. Red Hat mostly aggregates other projects into their "OS" package. They were sued becasue they have money, not because were the author of the infringing code. Most likely Red Hat not only saved themselves some bucks, they also kept some patent troll from destroying a piece of the FOSS ecosystem.
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Nonsense. He's long been a leading figure in the fight against software patents [wikipedia.org]. Groklaw has mounted a major FUD campaign against him because he violated the Groklaw prime directive ("Thou Shalt Not Criticize IBM") and that seems to be the ultimate source of most of the negative claims against him.
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Groklaw is something I've never bothered to read and it became quite apparent to me very quickly that he was in fact a troll.
You can blame Groklaw if you want, but there's plenty of us independently minded folk who have similarly come to the same conclusion based simply on the fact that much of what he does post really is actually provably false.
You can't blame people for not wanting to swallow FUD, and whether the Groklaw community has similarly found distaste for him is neither here nor there. Whatever he
A fixed payment is not a royalty (Score:1)
Wikipedia defines royalties as "usage-based payments made by one party (the "licensee") and another (the "licensor") for ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property.". While wikipedia is not authoritive that matchs my own understanding of royalties. By their very nature royalty payments are on going.
Thus Redhat is not paying royalties to FireStar (present tense) they have paid (past tense) money to them as a royalty-buy-out (meaning neither they, nor any downstream user, must pay royalties).
Payment not secret (Score:3)
Typical Florian. RedHat didn't keep the payment secret. What they redacted was the amount of the payment, not that there was a payment. I suspect it was redacted at the insistence of the other party, who didn't want any of their other victims knowing what kind of deal to shoot for themselves.
The Microsoft Shill Florian Mueller? (Score:4, Informative)
Florian Mueller a shill (Score:5, Informative)
I'm puzzled... (Score:1)
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Since "free" can have more than one meaning, many folks use phrases like "FLOSS" (where the "L" stands for "libre", from the Latin for "liberty"), "Free as in freedom, not beer", or they may change the capitalization on the word "free".
Just as citizens of certain countries consider themselves to be free, in that they are not oppressed by some regime, dictator, etc. and can move about and act more or less as they please, software can be defined in the same sense: by not being locked down by a given company
Flashback... (Score:1)