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Kodak Wins $1 Billion Java Lawsuit
nberardi writes "The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle is reporting that Eastman Kodak Company has just won a patent suit against Sun on the Java Language. According to the article Kodak owns a patent which describes a way for a piece of software to "ask for help" from another application. What they are claiming is that Sun violates this patent when Java byte code uses the Java engine to run the code. This may really upset the industry, because not only Sun uses this technology for Java but Microsoft uses this technology in .Net."
PJ has an excellent analysis of this case and what software pantents mean for the industry over at Groklaw this morning.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Python, most modern basics (GFA, QBasic, ...), Perl,...
Shall I write the check to Kodak or Eastman-Kodak sir? Cuz I have a script to hack on the server tonite.
sheesh...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Forget Sun, this is batshit nuts. Bytecode interpreters have been common since Smalltalk in the 70s and are used by a simply huge number of common progrmaming languages.
Does anyone have the patent in question? Can this be appealed?
The article text says the dollar amount hasn't been decided yet and Sun is probably going to appeal anyway.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
It was only decided that Sun had infringed on Kodak's patent. Kodak will return to court and they're initial claim of damages is $1 billion. So it's only a worst-case that Kodak would end up with that much, they'll most likely get less.
However, this still leaves that fact that, unless an appeal overturns this ruling, Sun will need to pay Kodak something for every java product out there. Wow is the patent office messed up... anybody think of some prior art out there?
-Fatty
Kodak doesn't make chemicals any more, they spun those operations off into Eastman Chemical several years ago.
Kodak now buys its chemicals from the open market.
Actually, you may be wrong there. When you type "gcc -o foo foo.c", gcc "asks for help" from:
1) cpp - to preprocess any include files, macros, conditional compiles, etc;
2) the code generator - to generate assembler;
3) the assembler - to generate object files;
4)the linker - to generate the executable.
On top of that, when you execute the program, the kernel "asks for help" from the dynamic linker, for all those shared libraries your program needs.
Off-hand, I'd say we're fucked... What we really need is to find a way to prove some kind of anti-competitive conspiracy between, say, Microsoft and Kodak, or possibly SCO and Kodak, or even all three...
Try http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =3&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=kodak&s2=bytecode&OS =kodak+AND+bytecode&RS=kodak+AND+bytecode
Feel free to use/adapt my letter (in the parent post). Here's where to send your letter:
Eastman Kodak Company
Attn: Corporate Information
343 State Street
Rochester, New York 14650
There are probably other reasons to boycott Kodak besides the fact that they pulled a SCRambus--such as their offshoring.
To answer your question, Patents:
5,206,951
5,226,161
5,421,012
Kodak bought the patents from Wang Laboratories.
My source
And it pre-dates Wang (The GIANT Killer) by a few years in it's implementation. They were called Supervisor calls.
He's referring to UCSD Pascal, I think, which was a fairly successful cross-platform interpreted language. More info here.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Monsanto has consistently been in my list of BigEvil for a while now. Historically, they are the company that brought us DDT, PCB's and Agent Orange. Currently, they're the ones seeding farmer's crops with pollen containing genes that they have patented, and then suing the farmers for patent violations. Also, getting the World Bank to pressure third world countries to abandon traditional crops in favor of licensing Monsanto GMO seed, a license which requires annual renewal of course.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I always prefer to get my info from primary sources rather than some newspaper's rendition, so here are the actual patents involved:
/.)
Patent 5,206,951: Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types
Patent 5,421,012: Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
Patent 5,226,161: Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types
Thanks to Artur Biesiadowski, who orignally posted these at Java Lobby.
I haven't had a chance to read them in detail yet; they're slow reading. '012 seems to be the broadest, and it's very, very long. They seem actually to patent object-oriented programming, but they reference the Smalltalk documentation so presumably they're patenting some enhancement. I've been unable to determine what that enhancement is over Smalltalk, so I can't say if Java infringes on it or not.
A note on reading patents: the title is worthless, so please don't write about "I did X in 1967" based solely on the title. The abstract is hardly better, though my quick scan of these indicates that the abstract does actually do a good job of summarizing. The only thing with legal force is the claims, but they're written in a specialized patent language that takes a bit of practice to interpret.
You can usually learn the most from reading the description section, with background and summary, which has less legal force than the claims but is written in something closer to plain English (or at least computer-ese, which you probably speak if you're reading
in the suit!
Progress (1984 to current)
Progress 4GL "compiled" to byte code, required Progress 4GL engine to execute the code.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
As far as I can make out, the patents are about ORBs (object request brokers) in middleware.
And the patents were filed just a few months before CORBA 1.0 was released.
So I think the lawsuit is not about the use of bytecode interpreters/compilers. It is about the middleware mechanisms provided by Java.
It's a civil matter.
Correct me if I am wrong, but civil matters are decided by a judge not a jury. Only criminal cases are decided by a jury.
Yup, they really fumbled their opportunity for jumping on the early digital bandwagon. Here's proof that they're dying, and it has taken a toll on the city of Rochester, NY. Kodak used to be one of the Dow Jones 30 component stocks, but no longer as of this year. Another nail in the coffin ...
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I quickly perused one of the patents (and got completely lost in the legalspeak; how the hell is anyone supposed to know if they're infringing a patent when you can't even understand WTF the patent means?!); it was dated 1993.
And Sun tried to demonstrate prior art; one comment on Groklaw says they introduced 77 boxes full of exhibits of prior art. And they still lost.
What a week. First EULAs are ruled enforceable, and now this. If we all want to be legally safe, we may as well just shut off all our computers at this point, because you can be damn sure that we're all probably infringing some stupid term in a EULA or some vague claim in a patent. All hail the United States legal system!
Excuse me while I go vomit.
First RTFM. The patents were purchased from Wang.
EKC has had its hands in many pots: photographic chemicals, digital printers, OLEDs, special effects, night vision goggles. And it just sold a division which is now ITT Space Systems Division.
Kodak defined itself by the little yellow box, but it did range of business most people knew nothing about.
ShoutingMan.com
The content of the patent does seem a bit familiar - I have seen something very similar used in Microsoft Windows API, where Microsoft Word requests another application to modify an image. Either Microsoft has found a method that somehow evades the patent, or Kodak is simply building a case law before they can take on MS.
At least I checked the abstract - most others are incorrectly assuming that Java is infringing on the bytecode interpreter.
Well, UCSD Pascal (P System) appears to date from the late 70's...so there's prior art right there.
If another poster's correct, and Sun produced 77 boxes worth of prior art, this should be appealed to a higher court that knows what it's doing.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
It sure sounds to me like any interpreted language would infringe, or be prior art. Lisp had an interpreter all the way back in 1958. A bit more recently, the Bourne Shell did this. I can't find a patent number anywhere, but I doubt this predates Lisp and the Bourne Shell. Time for us to get even more pissed off than we did when Eolas beat Microsoft in the trial court. This really needs to be dealt with in Congress. Go write your Representatives and Senators. I am.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
For running a typesetting system for patent applications?
No, really!.
This is quite beyond reason, technically all computer programs have worked this way since the earliest days of VAX and such. The prior art on this particular patent is more than substantial. According to their patent, runtime linking to a library would be illegal without paying it up to grand daddy Kodak. I suggest to people in the US to get up in arms about Software Patents. Not only are they beyond stupidity, they are generalized and require no implementation. Software patents are dangerous, everyone is entitled to their work not being distributed and such, but Kodak did nothing here, they just bought a couple patents. They have not been harmed, because A) they didn't create anything like Java and distribute it, and B) this doesn't compete with them.
Oh btw, this affects EVERY computer language out there pratically now, so expect to see your favorite languages organizers asking for help from the EFF.
Remember there is very very little intellectual property in the computer industry, most of it is just property, not intellectual.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-836322.html
So if this patent is on the distributed systems middleware aspects, there's certainly likely to be prior art.
$260M in cash for their software business .. the hardware side was pretty much dead by that point anyhow .. wang's only major presence was in the public sector (gov't and such) and i believe sun had competing technology so that kind of buyout didn't make that much sense back then (imo)
.. i believe the origin of this idea in software is predated back to the 60's in LISP, so while IANAL i believe one could argue prior art and thus the invalidity of the wang software patent (s/w patents seem pointless to me anyhow - like recipe patents) .. i believe there's a large number of s/w patents that have been and continue to be awarded in large part due to the lack of due diligence from patent attorneys, hence we may see a new glut of lawsuits from the failing institutions looking for a quick cash boost
on a side note
People forget but Kodak _were_ a Unix company at one point. Kodak interactive systems corporation. In fact if I remember rightly and ironically they sold that business to Sun to help Solaris x86 off the ground.
Another dying US corporation harms the efficiency of US businesa and harms other US businesses. Its no wonder the Chinese are winning in the technology battles.
Alan
This is, of course, a completely false charge that anyone can verify for themselves over at Groklaw any time they want. Typically, it was an AC who made the false charge.
I happen to be a professional software engineer working for a large, well known company. Having had a class in how to read patents wouldn't have done much good, since we have standing orders from the highest levels of the company to never, ever read any patent that might possibly be related to anything the company does. The only thing we're allowed to do related to a patent is to write up proposals for new ones and hand them off to the lawyers. There's just too much liability otherwise.
You're full of crap, and I do know of what I speak, being well connected to the phone industry.
The AT&T domestic backbone was for all intents and purposes entirely circuit-switched (TDM nowadays) until the past couple of years. The Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers are almost entirely circuit-switched. MCI and Sprint are circuit switched. The phone backbones use SONET transmission and TDM switches.
There are narrow examples of packet switching in the phone network. AT&T rolled out a Frame Relay-based system in the late 1980s, to compress the bandwidth on high-cost international links. Others have done similar things, for the same reason, with various vendors' technology. It's called "Digital Circuit Multiplication Equipment" (DCME). But domestic SONET bandwidth is so cheap that DCME isn't worth using, especially since DCME degrades call quality. And it's used below the switch layer, to make more TDM virtual channels.
There's a fair amount of ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) floating around too. Some LD carriers may use it, mostly as a multiplexing technique over SONET pipes. Verizon has started using Nortel's ATM switches in its own local networks, especially in New Jersey. But it's still a minority technology. AT&T (back when it owned Lucent, Bell Labs, etc.) was a major advocate of ATM technology, but hardly invented it in house by itself (more like the work a committee -- and I was on the committee, so I know why the camel's so humpy). AT&T also pushed hard for Frame Relay, largely to mix voice and data on DCME.
In today's LD world, Qwest's backbone is mostly VoIP, using Sonus switches. Ditto Wiltel, a fairly small player. AT&T has started to migrate to VoIP, as have Sprint and MCI, but it's not "over the Internet", it's just using IP headers as a multiplexing technique on fat dedicated circuits. Mainly because the VoIP switches are really cheap, and because Wall Street expects it. (The new switches do circuit switching too; the cost per minute differential is negligible. VoIP actually uses more bandwidth, regardless of what the propagandists claim, but fat TDM switch ports are a bit costlier.)
In the local world, VoIP is coming on strong in the form of PacketCable, again not over the public Internet. And of course Vonage and its imitators, who for all their bluster have a combined market share of far less than one percent. A little VoIP gets used here and there by other carriers. The Bells are experimenting with it, but it's a negligible share of their traffic. They're backward monopolists, but they also have reasonably high service-level standards, and they know how hard it is to do that with VoIP.
The signaling network is packet switched (Signaling System 7), but that's a whole story of its own.
Many versions of Pascal ran on a VM. So famously, in fact, that the term "p-code" (meaning a VM bytcode format) was derived from Pascal systems.
Then you haven't read the patent. At all. If you are going to read one thing, read the claims. The abstract can be completely irrelevant to the claimed invention, and the claims are what defines the scope of what a party can sue another for infringing on.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
I'll answer some of these, if you don't mind.
Perhaps you can explain how the selective movement of data from based upon certain criteria can be solved as a mathematical problem. You can use mathematical forumlas to determine if a piece of data should be moved, but those formulas will not tell you where to find the data, how to create the connection to the remote computer, etc...
Most software source code builds upon prewritten software libraries. While I may write a line of code that says (for example) "Variable webpage = HttpReturn('http://slashdot.org')", there is a library that knows how to do what you want. While your code doesn't explain mathematically what happens in the background, the library (or libraries it is built upon) does. This is similar to writing a math function "y = f(x)". You may not know how f(x) works, that f(x) = 2x + 3, but it is mathematical nonetheless.
I made a previous reply to your original post dealing with this same issue.
Perhaps you can tell me this then, assuming you were to obtain the discussed forumla, could you then simply enter that mathematical formula into a computer and have it function in the same way as the amazon one-click shopping patent, complete with credit card processing, inventory and shipping management?
Building on what I said above, as long as the "computer" (using the term loosely) has the functionality and libraries on which the mathematical formula of Amazon's code depends, then absolutely yes it would function the same. But, then again, the best and most appropriate library functions for Amazon's code are built into your web browser... it behaves as the computer for that code.
Now, if you want to go lower level, you could feasibly extract all of the web browser's code, all of the operating system's code, and all logical hardware functions into a logical math equation. Combining these with Amazon's code would give you a single, gigantic math formula on which Amazon runs.
You would have many input variables, such as from the mouse and keyboard ports, the ethernet or phone line providing Internet access, and internal devices such as a system clock and feedback from hardware controllers. You would also have many output variables, such as output to your monitor, feedback to the ethernet or phone line, and output to other hardware controllers.
So long as all variables are connected properly to their hardware signals, Amazon's one-click software would behave EXACTLY as expected.
Wang had the patents, Kodak bought them.
Microsoft settled claims with Wang and paid $90 mil for the tech.
No matter what happens in the Sun lawsuit, Microsoft is immune due to that prior licensing agreement.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
07/088,622 is a patent application rather than a patent. To view patent applications use the advanced search page and enter APN/088622. Only those that became patents are online, however; applications aren't made public. Presumbably, 07/088,622 was never granted a patent, because I can't find it either, but several of the other applications are available as patents.
Generally the history of a patent isn't available. It's not unheard of for people to submit a woefully under-defined patent, submit a bunch of continuations, and then sue somebody. You can't do it any more, but it used to be very profitable. Sadly, I don't know any way to get the whole history. Maybe you could call up a buddy at the USPTO and get into the computer system that way...
To answer your question: no, you don't have to match all the claims. (NOTE: I am NOT a lawyer, and if you believe anything I say they will throw you in jail.) Each claim is considered independently; arguably, each could be written up as a separate patent. It is common, however, for claims to refer to earlier claims. The first claim is often overly-broad and it's the subsequent claims that really specify what's being patented, and it's those claims that are tested in a court.
"...I just want to see that little piece of shit Kodak in ruins, that's what I want to see."
As the child of a "Kodak" family, please let me remind you that although you may not appreciate its business practices, Kodak drove the Rochester area economy for decades. Without that my family and many many others in that part of upstate NY would have been worse off than we were.
Rather than wishing the complete destruction of a company, please consider more productive uses of your valuable time, such as knitting or growing a chia pet.
If it's just a lot of hearsay and you've never owned one, why are you ranting about it and spreading FUD?
It is certainly not a high iso camera, but in it's intended environment (studio, or well lit environments), the Kodak 14N & SLR/N are really in class of their own, they resolve some serious detail with quality rivalling medium format at their low iso's (say, 320 and below).
Soft images? It's the opposite - the camera does not have an anti alias filter so the images come out a lot sharper than the rest - in fact Canon is the company that should be accused of having soft images, with their cmos sensors relying on strong AA filters and heavy in camera noise reduction, they need a significant amount of sharpening in post processing to meet the same sharpness levels the kodaks give.
Ergonomics is personal but I find it quite good, it's basically a beefed up N80.
Batttery life - well remember it's 14mp and the 400 shot battery life is fine. Kodak intended it to be tethered in a studio. 400 is still fine though.
I don't own one, but I did eval one very recently for my wedding business. In it's intended bracket, it's stunning.
*QUOTE*
Ever met anyone who uses one? Nope, me neither, and I hang out with a lot of professional modelling/sports/commercial photographers. It's by all accounts a horrible camera. It cannot do long exposures, it cannot do moderate or high ISO sensitivies, the images are badly softened, it's built about as ergonomically as a brick, and the battery life sucks. Of course, I've never owned one, that's all just hearsay from people who have.
...that this will do absolutely nothing to alter Sun's opinion of Software Patents, irrespective of how utterly ludicrous this situation is. Sun quite happily admit to being an "Intellectual Property Company". Certainly they actually *create* IP, unlike SCO, but ultimately, they strongly believe in Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Patents. In fact, Johnathan Schwarz made a post on his Blog a couple of days ago, specifically stating his view on Intellectual Property:
...and how he recently refused to support a "CEO of one of the more popular Open Source companies" in campaigning against Software Patents:
With an attitude like that, this case will not do us any favours. We're not going to get a new Anti-Software Patent ally out of this, when Sun realise the futility of patenting. They'll do their utmost to have the court's decision overturned, and possibly invalidate the patent, but at the end of the day, they'll sort out that patent and just move on to the next one.