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She doesn't work for a divorce attorney? Prove it.

Anybody can say anything on the internet. I have a unicorn in my garage. Oh you doubt it? Well.. prove it ! Hah !

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050414214437589

PJ continues to hide.

"I chose PJ, because it could be anyone, either sex, any nationality, anyone and no one in particular. "

" I don't do interviews about me as an individual, I decline all invitations to speak at conferences and seminars, and I've turned down all invitations to be interviewed on camera."

How convenient. No way to verify that its a real person. Unless PJ is going to be killed (and nobody believes that) if she outs herself, there is very little reason not to. Especially because other than Linux cheeerleaders like you nobody is going to take anything she says seriously given that THERE ISNT ANY WAY to verify that she is not funded by IBM. She denies it, IBM denies it (LOL.. duh) but nobody can even be sure its a real person.

They already *have* gone after her (private investigators... turned up nothing) back during the SCO case.

Nobody has "gone" after her. If some anonymous blogger was continuously twisting facts about my company and possibly affecting the outcome of an important legal case, I'd want to make damn sure that its not a fake account funded by the opposition.

Besides which.. Maureen O'Gara *NEVER GOT TO MEET HER*. They mistook another woman for her. Jesus.. are you this stupid that you don't know these basic facts?

Anyway you've convinced me that all you want to do is drag out a pointless argument about which you have zero facts other than what some random person on the internet told you and you took it as gospel. Goodbye.

If you're pj, please update the recent Groklaw story with a little note to the effect that comment 39738733 was authored by you. That should just take a few seconds. Thanks.

Dude, it doesn't matter if Oracle has film and eyewitnesses to show Google cutting-and-pasting from Oracle's source code, because the only copyright claims they have are for the API! And as you yourself said, APIs are not copyrightable. Pre-trial motions have already resulted in the following two jury instructions:

1. The Java programming language is open and free for anyone to use.
2. The names of the Java language API files, packages, classes, and methods are not protected by copyright law.

The judge has already seen the evidence Oracle has, and has ruled that no code was copied (except for those frequently-mentioned six lines of code, which Google has already admitted to copying).

It doesn't matter how huge a pile of evidence Oracle may have. The only thing they're allowed to try to claim is the APIs. And I'm pretty sure that not being protected by copyright law trumps even the hugest pile of evidence.

If they don't use them to sue people, what would be the point of having them.

The nuclear weapons analogy is very appropriate: You're not supposed to have to use them. If you actually end up litigating a patent, something has gone terribly wrong.

The problem is this: If you have a valid patent and you want to use it for exclusion like patents are intended (like pharmaceutical companies do), you don't end up in court, because your competitors know you have a valid patent and don't bother infringing it, or stop when you tell them to.

But that isn't what happens in the tech industry. Instead, everyone has a huge pile of overly broad and obvious patents which everyone else is infringing (and only because none of them should ever have been issued), and the cost of litigating that many patents is almost always prohibitive. The consequence is that no one can use them for exclusion, because as soon as you file a lawsuit you get one back and it's mutually assured destruction. At the same time, you still have to have a huge patent arsenal in order to deter all the other companies from going to you for a shake down using a huge pile of questionable patents that would almost always cost more to litigate and invalidate than license. In this case the problem was that Oracle was vastly overvaluing the patents -- they were claiming $6B in damages at the start of all this. Now it looks like if they win it's going to end up being more like something less than $50M. Which is almost certainly less than the amount Oracle is having to spend in legal fees.

The sole purpose of buying sun seems to be to attack google with their IP... for what purpose I don't know.

I don't know if that's really it. I think part of it is that there are a very large number of old, conservative, high-spending Oracle customers who use Sun hardware, and if Sun dies then those customers are going to be looking for a new vendor, and in the process they could end up being sold an Oracle competitor's database. So Oracle staged a Sun bailout. They just happened to end up with Java in the process.

The thing is, Java means something different to Oracle than it ever did to Sun. The original point of Java was to stop people from writing apps in Visual Basic or against the Win32 API which then wouldn't run on Solaris and SPARC -- Java was "write once, run anywhere" so you could write your app for whatever you have now and then Sun could come in at some point and pitch some hardware to you and it would still run your software.

Oracle is instead looking at it as a licensing opportunity. Lots of people are using Java, Oracle wants money. The problem is that their patents are crap and claiming copyright on an API is ridiculous. It's like claiming a copyright on the bolt pattern in a piece of industrial equipment so that no competitors can make replacement parts. It's purely functional, and copyright only covers expression, not function. Functionality is the domain of patents.

"Except of course a bunch of lawyers getting wealthy off these two companies. Case in point: The SCO debacle is still ongoing. There are lawyers still wringing cash out of that mess and it's been nearly a decade. And that is some dinky shell company versus IBM. Two giants with deep pockets slugging it out? It will never end. And why should it? Lawyers get paid by the hour. "

err SCO has been "over" for a while now http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110830170454743&query=red+dress

now of course there are lawyers still chatting over the "bits" but the case (and the company) is OVER.

Microsoft has been left relatively alone while Google and Facebook and Apple have faced the most severe scrutiny of late. Also the fact that conversation about the patent wars is dominated by Florian Mueller and people quoting Florian Mueller has meant Microsoft has got off very lightly, even in its extremely dubious attempts to collect royalty for Android based on software patents, and attemps at bullying smaller companies like BArnes and Noble: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011111122291296

Or the fact that despite anti trust rulings, we still get Windows bundled with all non Apple laptops with no option to avoid paying for it, and IE is still bundled?

No, they still get off too lightly.

Hi Larry Bagina!

I fail to see substance to your claims of competitiveness. There are cheaper phones that do more than microsoft phones can. If your idea of "competitive" is a display and a wireless connection than sure, anything can be competitive. If you're talking smartphones you're full of shit.

You don't have to post the same thing twice.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120209222500188 is a nice and succinct answer to why the B&N vs MS case is only beginning. To act like its' over is FUD.

Oh really now? Hi microsoft shill, let's call you on your lies.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120209222500188

Also new evidence to substantiate B&N's claims seem to be showing up every day:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225831/Why_tech_vendors_fund_patent_trolls_?taxonomyId=214 being *EXACTLY* what B&N have claimed.

I love how you act like it's over just because rejected a single complaint. I guess you were so quick to troll and hide information you couldn't even get your spelling right.

A practicing entity - a real company - has an incentive to not troll with its patents.

That disincentive only works for large companies with similar patent warchests. Small companies, end users etc. can get just as screwed by a practicing entity, since they have no or few patents. What are you going to do when someone sues you for patent infringement if you use Facebook? What are you going to do if you really do invent some new technology, say a new graphics pipeline rendering technology? Do you think that Nvidia would hesitate to take you down with their patent warchest to take you down if your new technology posed a direct threat to their profits? And how would you stop non-practicing entities creating trivial examples of their patents - would they need to have some level of market share or product revenue before qualifying as practicing? What if they license out the patent, but don't directly sell a product?

Microsoft has always been one of the best innovators about new technology. Against the popular belief on Slashdot, they have contributed a lot to computer technology, innovations, and of course, Linux too.

First, I really hope you do some investigation on the history of Microsoft and the products that they claim to have innovated. You will find that many of us have very legitimate bias against Microsoft and their so called "innovation".

Example: Microsoft during Windows 95 release was adamant about not producing a TCP/IP stack for Windows claiming that the Internet was a waste of time and there is nobody in their right mind that would use it. Microsoft released and poured cash into their own proprietary network protocol (NetBUI).

When the hopes of crushing the Internet were dashed, Microsoft started releasing a TCP stack which broke communication with non Windows hosts. The original TCP/IP specification was to respond to an ACK once. Microsoft released a stack which sent and expected 2, and invented the term "Crippled Network" for anything that did not respond that way. Throttling bandwidth to any non-Microsoft host to make it appear that anything was slower than Microsoft. (An interesting piece of trivia is that most *NIX was still faster than Windows at networking even with the throttled bandwidth.).

Sun found the (to be kind) quirk that Microsoft had build in to their TCP/IP stack. This was reported everywhere, and most vendors started releasing similar code because Microsoft refused to follow the specification. As vendors migrated their stacks, Microsoft increased the ACK count again. At least they stopped reporting any non windows host as "crippled" which stopped many of the complaints to other vendors about "Why does windows show your OS as crippled?"

This is a company that has done the same with any open specification that they adopt. Kerberos, NFS, LDAP, and the list can go on and on and on.

When it comes to "innovation", Microsoft does do a good job of watching the market and buying up things that appear to be good. Often times, this puts many other good companies out of business. Example here is that in WIndows 98 time, there were several web rating companies. NetNanny, Cybersitter, and more. Windows liked their ideas so much, they put a very limited and broken version of that service in to Windows and put all of those companies out of business. Not so much innovation here, but rather a predatory method of dealing with competition which people dislike.

Stop the hate and accept that Microsoft also has many technically knowledgeable persons who also contribute to Linux. When reading this hate about MS I can't but think that YOU are who is having problems with dealing with it.

Honestly, I think Microsoft has done a good job at giving people a consistent look and feel on a computer. For some odd reason, they do away with in Windows 7, and Office 2010 and the "Ribbons" which is why there is such a low adoption rate and Microsoft started losing more market share than they should.

Outside of the look and feel, Microsoft has not innovated anything in the market. I wish that was a troll statement, but nothing they have done has been "new" or innovative. That's not to say that they have no patents, but every patent I have seen could be invalidated in court. Look at the 7 they are suing B&N for as an example. All 7 of those are either obvious or have prior art. Groklaw has lots of information

When you see all the hate for Microsoft, do you ever wonder if it's warranted?

err whoops, let me link to how they did prevail against bedrock:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110717140031881&query=bedrock

undisclosed settlement, obviously less than $5m, settled out of court. It could be money, or it could be zero. we don't know. I'd sure lean on zero.

You mean the case where bedrock had to willingly dismiss it's claims, and google can still appeal? Where the patent is in the process of being invalidated?

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011051407561062&query=bedrock

whoops.

Fosspatents reporting has been very onsided and has been wrong every time in his predictions Dont listen to Florian.

If you want an indepth analysis and diskussion of this and other computor science related IP cases in our courts then its only one site on the net that provides that with bravur and thats

http://www.groklaw.net/

Groklaw deliver the goods. Its prediction of the outcome has been correct in this and many other legal cases.

I remember Microsoft just about killed themselves getting Windows 95 done, in reaction to OS/2's stronger than expected showing.

BTW, the MS anti-trust exhibits contains a lot of emails about this fiasco. Here is an interesting one:
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000/PX00307.pdf

The selective memory of you 'softie fans is amazing. There's a reason for these things. In 1986 Windows looked like this. Sales of Mac Office kept Microsoft alive in this period. Microsoft Office was moved to reinforce Windows as soon as Windows was a credible environment. Windows wasn't even a credible platform until Windows for Workgroups (Windows 3.11) was released in November 1993, some 7 years later (or 1/3 of the time to present day). Mac Office was so lagging for a long while after WfW launch that it was effectively discontinued, and Office's superior support of the Windows platform was a huge part of Windows assuming dominance over the superior Mac OS which had come to rely on Office, which now offered degraded inferior performance and features on the Mac OS. There were some other shenanigans you can read about in the above links. It was a very successful strategy you can read more about here - enough horrifying content to keep you awake for years. But if that's not enough, you might try these. Microsoft through these lessons evolved a strategy where all their products have to reinforce each other, and that became their core strategy. And then...

Apple got some traction in their TrueType font rendering patent suit against Microsoft and the Justice department was closing in on an antitrust action legendary in its scope and reach. Bill Gates blinked, and they settled, and now there's Mac Office, but you can't say that it's fully supported. The Mac versions lag the Windows versions by some years and are not fully compatible with each other in ways that can't be explained by OS platform differences. The Office platform supports Windows now, as you can see by all the sockpuppets who come out every time somebody mentions some non-Windows operating system to say "you can't get Microsoft Office for that and you never will." And then the rest of us chime in "Application vitualization solves that problem."

Eventually Microsoft discovered political advocacy and contributed in various ways to the installation of a government more supportive of their business activities. Then the enforcement of antitrust protections to limit them and protect us against their abuse of their monopoly became lax, the limits were quashed until those protections expired. But that's another long story for another day.

So you forget Microsoft's deal with the U.S. government to use it and with OEMs to bundle Word, which is really what made almost every large business move to MS Office. Oh, and that was the time when MS switched APIs on WP last minute on the roll-out of Win95, a confusion which the MS Office team didn't suffer from. A combination of savvy business and unethical behavior. That was and is Microsoft's business model. That's why they're still in court over the whole mess.

What the fuck do you make up? Go back to microsoft-imaginationland please. This is not how it works.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120213092754823

Microsoft's FRAND terms and apple's on firewire have already been found discriminatory - kinda rich for them to be going after google for not asking for FRAND, which isn't compatible with open source.

Oh, c'mon, that's covered in RFC1918, isn't it? I didn't even have to look the number up. Step One was observe the standards.

The real problem is 800 lb gorillas who ignore and subvert Internet standards for competitive advantage, and the ITU is not exactly set up to chastise that sort of actor. These are the people who gave us X.500, for chrissakes! If there's anybody less trustworthy than the US government it would be a consortium of telecommunications giants.

Well if those emails that Oracle got a hold of are allowed in court

Are you talking about Lindholm email? it was allowed in court, and an out of context conversation of people that doesn't know enough to determine of two systems are similar does not a proof make.

Actually, one facet of the case is overtly weirder than any fantasy scenario you could cook up (pun intended):

Accuser: "You owe us $100,000"

Defendant: "Now what did we do?"

Accuser: " We patented making candy with sugar. You're making candy with sugar. That's one violation. Furthermore, our candy cookbook says you're not allowed to use our recipes to create any candy which would compete with our candy,, because you'd be violating our patent, and we withdraw your permission to read our cookbook if you violate our patent. You admitted your candy is based on reading our cookbook. You violated our copyright TOO! YOU OWES US BEEG MONEYZ!!!111"

For those who don't want to absorb the entire groklaw article: Oracle's Java specification license attempts to assert its copyright over any work written to implement the specification. If you write a "competing" implementation of the Java API based on the specification, you're retroactively violating the copyright license on the specification you read. That's right, you dirty retroactively violating pirate.

I hope the court realizes what flaming arrogant idiots Oracle is coming across as. And punishes them for it, rather than rewarding them for it, as often happens.

Nobody cares about the money. Can Android be stopped because of this?

Groklaw's latest: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120220133911859

Oracle should think long and hard about whether it wants to persist on the issue of patent infringement or, for that matter, any infringement at all. Those failed settlement discussions probably look a lot more attractive to Oracle right now.

I'm going to go with "argumentum ad verecundiam" here - I know... bad form.

Here's Professor Emeritus Knuth's Letter to the patent office.

Here are a collection of quotes with references.

If you don't know who Donald Knuth is, you should find out before trying to participate in this discussion. It seems unlikely to me there exists a software patent that isn't derivative of his work.

And since I'm a Groklaw fan, here's a Groklaw article about the good professor's views on the subject.

While the Microsoft suit was underway, the company applied for a second patent, which it received on Oct. 6, 2009. The same day, Eolas filed suit â" in East Texas â" against more than 20 big companies

No limitations here.

Yes, but a patent for things related to the interactive web granted in 2009 (and filed in the mid to late 2000s) is certainly going to have prior art.

If it's a continuation patent, see Symbol Technologies/Cognex Corporation v. Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that arguing that a patent is invalid in court is a defence against patent infringement. See here for an example where Red Hat showed prior art during trial and got a patent troll's patents invalidated. Similarly in this case, even if B&N fail to show patent misuse, they have a ton of prior art, and arguments that the patents are trivial and don't actually properly disclose the "invention". See here.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that arguing that a patent is invalid in court is a defence against patent infringement. See here for an example where Red Hat showed prior art during trial and got a patent troll's patents invalidated. Similarly in this case, even if B&N fail to show patent misuse, they have a ton of prior art, and arguments that the patents are trivial and don't actually properly disclose the "invention". See here.

See PJ's comment on Groklaw. Covers it pretty well.

Litigation isn't like football. It is rarely suddenly over.

Witness the neverliving, undying horror which is SCO v. Novell. Still, there are moments that you can persuasively say "Ok, it's over", even if the vanquished is still struggling. Like:

20-Nov-2008: Final Judgment in favor of Novell, Inc., SCO Group and also against Novell, Inc., SCO Group. Case Closed. Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells no longer assigned to case. See Judgment for details. Signed by Judge Dale A. Kimball on 20-Nov-2008.

This particular setback* for B&N is pretty harsh, and I (though not a lawyer) don't know of any way to undo the damage.

Mueller has a tendency to go all "end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it" in his pronouncements, but the (accurate) retelling of this news is still interesting and useful (once you dig out the mere facts).

It would have been nice if Groklaw could have covered this development in and of itself, rather than as a pointless rebuttal to Mueller. Really, do we have to concede initiative to this guy? Can't we just report the facts and ignore him?

*Ok, maybe I play World of Warcraft too much, but I think I just read that in the voice of Kael'thas. "Merely a setback", indeed.

Not really:
The Latest on the Barnes & Noble Patent Misuse Defense - Some AntiFUD

Hmm, nope. PJ's article raises several questions that boil down to just one:

I mean, seriously, if all the evidence isn't in and so hasn't been considered, what can any initial determination mean?

And this is answered in the original article:

The OUII basically concluded that even if all of what Barnes & Noble said about Microsoft's use of patents against Android was accurate, it would fall far short of the legal requirements for a patent misuse defense.

Kind of ironic that the "FUD" article offers information and analysis while the "anti"-FUD article raises questions without trying to answer them; questions that were answered in the original "FUD" article!

before making any assumptions:

I'm seeing a couple of articles about an initial determination by the ITC against Barnes & Noble on its patent misuse defense, and there's quite a lot of spin on the ball, thanks to the usual suspects. They are reading a lot into a title of a sealed document. I see many misstatements.

So I'll explain a little about the process, so you can understand it. For one thing, the title of the sealed ITC initial determination is called an *initial* determination for a reason. It means it isn't final. The final one comes later. Initial determinations can be reviewed by the full ITC if the defendant petitions for review and even one Commissioner says yes.

Litigation isn't like football. It is rarely suddenly over.

Most importantly, the materials and depositions Barnes & Noble is seeking in discovery from Nokia and MOSAID have not yet arrived, although the ITC did grant Barnes & Noble's motion to ask Finland and Canada to provide them, and that's still ongoing, so there is likely more to go, even at the ITC. So with those materials not yet in hand, Microsoft's statement today that this means the defense is meritless is... well... to put it kindly premature. I mean, if a determination is made without the complete record being available, what does it mean?

Lots more here.

And here's what an actual freakin IP attorney thinks. I remember when Mueller got backed into a corner on that site a while back - he was *way* out of his depth even with amateurs.

Not really:
The Latest on the Barnes & Noble Patent Misuse Defense - Some AntiFUD

It's better than that, too.

Oracle is responsible for delays which is jeopardizing its own case. If you read through the Groklaw articles about this case, it's pretty clear that Oracle's patents are being disintegrated by the Patent and Trademark Office's reexaminations.. They've already lost about half of their asserted claims in the case, and they run the risk of further invalidation of the patents they're asserting here if they delay any further.

It would be hilariously ironic if they finally come up with a credible damages assessment just about the same time all of their patents completely evaporate.

The US patent system is totally broken.

link

link

It's not about the license itself, but the underlying code. BSD == A T & T == lots of patents.

[Citation needed]. The AT&T lawsuit was about copyrights, not patents; see the settlement of the lawsuite. The only patent I know of is the set-UID patent, which AT&T donated to the public.

Pure conjecture based on personal bias. Let's ask some multinational mega corporations who've actually seen the patents

Why, yes .... why don't we look at the information Barnes and Noble made public, and the detailed analysis done by Groklaw on the topic? That will be fun.

Why don't you educate yourself a little on the topic before you blindly go about accusing me of personal bias and an uninformed opinion ... because clearly you're lacking a lot of information yourself.

So, let's look at the analysis by people who know more about law than you or I:

But now I'll show you the other exhibits, Exhibits A, B, D, E and F, so you can get the full picture of what Barnes & Noble is accusing Microsoft of doing. Take a look especially at Exhibit D, where there is a long detailing of the incredibly insignificant patents Microsoft has the nerve to use against Android, claiming control of the entire operating system with what is pretty much a handful of stupid patents no one really needs or which are so trivial that the fees it claims become outrageous. At least that is Barnes & Noble's position. It made my blood boil to read it. As always, if you shouldn't look at patents, don't click to read the rest of the article.

Maybe it's you who knows less about this than you think? Because most of these patents are trivial, likely invalid, and the claims being made by Microsoft don't hold water. Like this little nugget:

In sum, Barnes & Noble maintains that the '372 patent inadequately describes a technique for downloading and displaying an electronic document having an embedded background image, and is anticipated and unpatentable in any event because the very functionality it purports to claim was already provided by a prior art Netscape browser before Microsoft filed its patent application.

Or this

The '536 and '853 patents relate to another minor feature, namely simulating mouse inputs using non-mouse devices. The '853 patent misrepresented the state of the art at the time the patent was filed by stating that "a need exists for permitting a user to perform all operations of a mouse-type device using a stylus." This, however is demonstrably incorrect. The '536 and '853 patents were filed in November 2000. Long before that time, numerous systems had been developed that enabled computer users to simulate mouse behavior with touch input devices.

But, hey, you feel free to believe everything Microsoft says as infallible truth. Unless you have facts, you're the one talking out of your ass.

I have a reasonable degree of confidence that these claims have been looked at, and there is strong reason to believe that much of what is being claimed falls into the category of really weak (and sketchy) patents.

How do you know that Adrianne is a man? ...
Took me about two seconds to find this:

Follow her @adrjeffries.

I don't pay a lot of attention to bylines and I don't pay a lot of attention to Twitter. All I did was skim TFA.

[Interjection: "... like, whether this is a privacy issue?". Sounds like she just graduated from grade 8. Not very professional.]
Moglen: Gives an eloquent and lengthy explanation whereupon Adrianne replies with the condescending remark "Right."

You're reading it as a condescending remark. I read it as a reporter asks a simple question and then can't get a word in edgewise. Anytime you see an unedited transcript of an interview you're going to see words like "uhhh," "right," "I mean," "sort of," etc. That doesn't change the fact that nothing Moglen said was helpful. The reporter wasn't asking for advice, but Moglen was incapable of saying anything that would have been useful in an article.

Now, are you going to continue to be an apologist for your fellow technology journalists, or will you apologize for you're sarcastic and sophomoric "Uhhh, I'm sorry..." reply?

I'm not going to apologize. Apologize for what? It was an idiotic comment to say that the reporter called Moglen asking for advice. Hey, whoever57... you're an idiot!

She doesn't seem like the greatest journalist in the world, but I thought her "interview" with Moglen was telling nonetheless. And it's not the first time Moglen has revealed himself as a bit of a kook. Here's a guy who thinks LLVM is a direct threat to world freedom:

Mr. Jobs is investing heavily in LLVM solely so he can stop using GCC, lest the patents somehow leak across the GPLv3 barrier, and we become able to use his claims. Nobody has ever tried before, to build a multi-platform C compiler solely in order to undermine freedom ... A hardware manufacturer or two has done something here and there -- we had a little bit of BSD interest in non-copyleft compilation -- but here's the man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness.

"Surpasses any recorded selfishness." Yeah. Here's a guy who's capable of objective thought.

What's the good, compelling reason that anyone is allowed to forfeit (or demand another party forfeit) what is otherwise a legal right? What was the justification given for considering this a legitimate part of contract law? Especially in one-sided, non-negotiable contracts of adhesion?

I was always under the impression you could not "sign away" your rights, and any contract that requires this was invalid.

Such a case came up in Washington State in 2008, and Groklaw jumped all over it due to its relation to another issue between Apple and Psystar.

AT&T's Consumer Services Agreement is substantively unconscionable and therefore unenforceable to the extent that it purports to waive the right to class actions, require confidentiality, shorten the Washington Consumer Protection Act statute of limitations, and limit availability of attorney fees. ... Courts will not be easily deceived by attempts to unilaterally strip away consumer protections and remedies by efforts to cloak the waiver of important rights under an arbitration clause. The dispute resolution section is severable from the balance of the contract.

.

The case involved AT&T attempting to force consumers into arbitration and prohibit Class Action suits:

It forbids class actions and requires that all arbitrations be kept confidential. The agreement also states in relevant part that "[n]o dispute may be joined with another lawsuit, or in an arbitration with a dispute of any other person, or resolved on a class-wide basis," and "[a]ny arbitration shall remain confidential.

PJ goes on to state that some States do allow waivers of class-based relief, but such a waiver would not extinguish your individual rights.

Washington State held that the contract was entered into in Washington, and New York law be dammed, AT&T had to remove such clauses from their contract without voiding the contract. The prohibitions against joining a Class Action were not only severable, but invalid.

IANAL, so I don't know if this is directly on point or not.

I like to see the fire and the energy swirling around Linux and Java in this discussion. My brother uses Mac's exclusively, because he works in the movies using Pro Tools -- and even if Pro Tools worked on Linux, he is committed and says "Apple operates by capitalizing on a lifestyle... How could the open source community match Apple, who has untold engineers, paid, working to make Mac's easy to use, and powerful?" Mac's seem a bit pricey to me. I've heard the OS is based on a *nix (FreeBSD). Also, their hardware supposedly works well because being the proprietary corporation for the hardware and software, Apple can dominate its suppliers and configurations, and say, "We want a battery that will last seven hours" or whatnot. All praise to Apple for making a good product that is derived from *nix..! However, their anti-competitive legal behavior with regard to Android disturbs me... Don't be evil..! A tablet is a generic category of nature..! You think _YOU_ invented a flat computer, or that only you have the right to make them?? Insane..! Linux, however, is the wave of the Future Earth... Google runs on it, as do the FBI and the National Security Agency (Security Enhanced Linux).. This guy Salus wrote a history of open source -- http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051013231901859 I think it is fascinating. My parents bought a Win7 laptop, which got fried by a virus within weeks of powering up. I convinced them to let me install Ubuntu. My Dad liked it fairly well, but he's a big iTunes user, so eventually my brother was convinced to give them one of his old Mac laptops. Now Dad can run iTunes, look at the super-slick Mac interface, and be reasonably certain that he might not get killed by another virus. Any suggestions on what I should do with the extra Linux box? Maybe bring it to my apartment, and experiment with using it as a firewall...(Oh, doesn't a firewall require two network interfaces? I don't think the little Toshiba lappy thought of that yet..) IPTables, packet mangling, Network Address Translation anyone? My XP box (Windows XP Media Center Edition) has an odd habit of complaining loudly that no firewall is turned on, but ironically it doesn't let me turn it on for long. I live in fear that my big box will get fried. I run Avast AV and do boot-time scans kind of frequently, and I am really reluctant to visit URL's I don't know. My Ubuntu lappy is my pride and joy. I always install all the updates as soon as possible. How could _I_ second-guess Canonical? This is what they do for a living, this is their profession. I am simply a user. Although I know how to program, and Java is my favorite language. I figure Oracle or whoever will work out a way to make Java work cross platform. That was Java's promise, wasn't it? A Virtual Machine running on a bunch of different OS's -- which your Java code would ride barebacked on and always work..! It disturbs me to hear shit talked on Java. I have a lot of study invested in it. What is the alternative? Well, Linux for instance is written in C.. Maybe if I ever decide to develop software, I could bite the bullet and do the menial labor of compiling it differently for each OS.. Or -- I don't give a shit about Windows or Mac OS -- why not simply go full force, full Linux -- and stop developing anything for any other OS?

The original complaint had dozens of points including bluray, games and even "I've lost my data" among others. Sony moved to dismiss and the judge tossed all of them out except for this, PSN-based one, as the only semi-reasonable. Plaintiffs filed a new complaint based just on the PSN entitlement, Sony moved to dismiss again again and the judge agreed again. This is all based on what I read in the groklaw's reports http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110218181557455

Perhaps it would be easier to keep all the phones up to date if the Microsoft Patent Licensing deal didn't involve renegotiation for each new Android version that you want to install on the phone...

Oh hey, guess what? MS charges LESS for a full install of WP7 than their bogus Android license fees. This is the same sort of behavior that got them in anti-competitive trouble LAST TIME. Funny how immediately after their DOJ anti-trust oversight expires, the ramp up the anti-competitive practices.

I hope B & N tears them a new one.

Doesn't it bother you just a little bit that I, some random poster on a blog can point to the the precise executive email that defined your response nearly 20 years ago?

It's worth reading through much more on Groklaw; this article explains that they were shell extension namespace APIs which made URL integration possible. It's pretty obvious that if WWW integration is a major new feature relied on throughout your code and Microsoft has promised to implement a large part of it, when they hide those APIs so that partners can't use them it's going to be a big problem.

http://groklaw.net/ ; tends to give better in depth coverage with fewer misunderstandings than most other observers of this lawsuit.

Whoever modded this troll, the truth hurts doesn't it? A reckoning is coming

I think they've got bigger things than just "Linux" to worry about right now. How long before the house of cards falls?

Besides doing a fat license deal, you're probably thinking about Baystar. Though there were others.

Baystar was the one - Gads, I've been following this since I had no grey hairs, not I've got a whole mess of them.

Besides doing a fat license deal, you're probably thinking about Baystar. Though there were others.

According Barnes and Noble this about open source software in general not just Android. They mention Tomtom and other non-Android device manufacturers. Microsoft is on a campaign to kill open source in the marketplace. More info available here and a damning PDF with lots of juicy information here

According Barnes and Noble this about open source software in general not just Android. They mention Tomtom and other non-Android device manufacturers. Microsoft is on a campaign to kill open source in the marketplace. More info available here and a damning PDF with lots of juicy information here

Something like this perhaps?

http://groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM
To: Jeff Westorinon; Ben Fathi
Cc: Carl Stork; Nathan Myhrvold; Eric Rudder
Subject: ACPI extensions

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific.

It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.

Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

Or maybe we could patent something related to this.