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Engineer Loses SSL Patent Case against RSA and VeriSign
MeanMF writes "eWeek reports that a jury has ruled in favor of the defendants in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by an electrical engineer who clamed rights to a technology used in the SSL protocol. Not only did he lose the case, but next week the jury will rule on whether his patents are valid at all."
You have to defend trademarks, not patents or copyrights. You can sit and let a patent stagnate for 10 years and then sue the balls off everyone later. The justification? They should have done their market research.
Look at Intergraph... CNet news claims (got this from the last posting about SCO vs. IBM): "In 2002, Intergraph's income from operations was $10 million, but its net income including legal settlements was $378 million."
Nasty stuff. Anyways, IIRC, Intergraph sued Intel and some other companies because of some kind of architecture design the Pentium used, specifically the system bus. Not sure if that's accurate, but try here and here.
Makes me want to get an arts degree, frankly.
Then you thought incorrectly. Trademarks are subject to such a required defense, but patents and copyrights are not.
There is the doctrine of laches, which allow a judge to hold that a patent holder, having allowed a use of their patent to go on without notice, cannot collect damages for use of their patent prior to filing suit, but this in no way invalidates their patent nor does it prevent them from collecting damages if the same defendant should happen to infringe on their patent in the future. (Laches is basically a way of wedging the reasonable "but I didn't know it was a problem" defense into patent law)
And no, IANAL, but I do know how to use Google (TM).
It wasn't a patent issue. The guy was simply claiming that MS was infringing on his trademark rights.
http://www.pdabuzz.com/News/viewnews.cgi?newsid101 0641863,9371,
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Defending the suit cost RSA and VeriSign over $2 million EACH. That does not include the cost of employee's time.
This is not the first time Stambler has done this type of thing.
No technical person familliar with SSL who has read the document can see how it is covered.
found here at section 154.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Looks more like evidence that the Patent office is owned by money and does not serve individual inventors. How are this man's patents any different from any other BS work protected by that office? Are they even valid? Most importantly, what makes you think he did not do anything with those patents or even needed to?
You don't need to do anything other than put a good faith effort. I could have an idea that would take billions of dollars to implement, it's still mine and the patent office would still grant me protection of that idea for being good enough to share it through them. If the only companies in the world with the kinds of resources to work that patent decided to sit for seventeen years the world is just that much worse off.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
GIF possibly patented? Well, now we have .png, which is also a superior format.
It's not superior if nobody can view it. Among popular web browsers, only KHTML-based (Konqueror; Safari) and Gecko-based (Mozilla; Netscape) browsers can display the MNG format. The most popular web browser supports GIF animations but not PNG animations out of the box. Thus, to reach the largest audiences, web sites will still serve animated advertisement banners as GIF instead of MNG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You have to defend trademarks, not patents or copyrights. You can sit and let a patent stagnate for 10 years and then sue the balls off everyone later.
If an alleged infringer convinces a U.S. court that a patent holder has harmed competitors by delaying legal action relating to a patent, the court may impose "laches" on him. Laches would mean that he cannot collect damages for infringements that had occurred before the patent holder brought legal action. Precedent states that a delay of at least six years is presumed harmful to competitors.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Moreover, the expired patent does not cover just XOR, it covers a system of which XOR is a part. Such a system as a whole was probably pretty novel in 1978. (Yes, software patents were perhaps too long given the pace of innovation at that time.)
I'm a nature photographer.
Fellas, the argument's moot, the patent expires this June.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
A very interesting (and insightful) account of the first two days of the trial can be found here
Not only did the other parties settle, they settled for huge amounts of money. First Data settled for $4 million. This, of course is on top of nearly a million dollars in other settlements from other victims, and on top of a $2.6 million settlement for Stambler's previous bogus patent. A nice way to make $7.5 million.