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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
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
$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
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.
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.