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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."
Dating back from OS/360 and possibly before, user program "asks for help" from the OS so that they could run.
Oh wait, that's prior art =)
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Okay, pull out your first issues of Dr. Dobbs Journal (Running Light without Overbyte) from the 1970s and chant:
Tiiiiiiinnnnnny Baaaaaaaasssssssssiiiiiicccccc
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Sure, the camera people. Their native market - chemicals, film, film cameras - is gradually dying due to advances in technology elsewhere, and so they plan to sue themselves right back into the game. Sound like a familiar plan?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Kodak is run by idiots. To beat fuji film they had to move production offshore. The problem with this is that Fuji Film makes it's film in the USA.
Kodak is run by people that only care about their money. Shareholders and employees come in damn near last.
As a side not, Kodak lost a patent suit against poloroid in the 80's that cost the company millions and forced the Kodak instant camera off the market.
Who am I missing?
I think before a company can go after another for patent violations, it must have a competing product. Since Kodak doesn't, it should be forced to take it's marbles and go home.
As Groklaw points out, patents only apply to software because of case law. That precedent should be overturned...perhaps this is the case that could make it happen. Software patents have been a bad idea from the get-go, and should have been squashed a long time ago.
As an aside, to those Microsoft people laughing at Sun's discomfiture in this case - Kodak went after the little fish first to get an easy win, it'll go after the big one next. Not only .Net, but VB also, is apparently within the scope of this thing. How many billions will that be worth? Stay tuned...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I am a software developer and amateur photography enthusiast, and I have recently learned about Kodak's patent infringement suit against Sun Microsystems. It is a shame that companies with failing business models consistently try to earn money through litigation rather than production and innovation. I realize that the proliferation of digital photography has caused hardship for the Eastman Kodak Company, but the use of this vague and overbroad patent against the software industry is unconscionable. As a direct result of this litigation, I will never again purchase another Kodak product, and I will encourage my family and colleagues to do the same. Malicious litigation is not an acceptable substitute for honest business.
This looks like it could be it:
T 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
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Makes me wonder about PCode, back in the day, ages ago when we compiled UCSD Pascal down to pcode and ran it on what amounted to a virtual machine. That was like 1980.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If Sun starts tanking rather badly because of this and making a few more majorly bad technology calls, it could become desperate enough to start going after everone with it's rather large and extensive patent porfolio.
This is a clear sign of the failure of the jury system. You're asking single mothers, housewives, college-dropouts, grannies and the likes to decide on technical issues. It's obviously (patently?) absurd when you step back from tradition and look at it. Of course such crowd would've heard of Kodak; it's their target marketting audience, but what are the chances that they've heard of Sun Microsystem? The jury is undoubtedly skewed in their bias. Such a case should be decided upon by a jury of people from within the industry with clear technical understanding of the issues at hand and in mind.
Post an example of what has been 'censored' and I will post it to GL and see if it is removed OR post something to GL and then post the URL to this thread so we can see if it is killed.
Software parents will likely continue like this while being technically literate is a negative for being a judge, and being literate in anything is likely to have you removed from a jury. It's high time that juries in specialist trials were recruited from (perhaps retired) people with skills from the appropriate areas - yes, and paid - so that the arguments could be properly understood.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I haven't read all of them yet but just the first one (5,306,951) is crazy. It basically covers the concept of having RTTI and taking different actions based on the runtime type of an object. The main example included in the patent is embedded objects in a word processor. OLE is almost certainly covered by this. In fact, any object system that handles dispatch based on type is. There have also been a series of continuations, meaning this dates back as far as the 1980s. On the other hand, the listed prior art is minimal, so perhaps it can be invalidated on those grounds.
why the hell did Sun's lawyers not pull CORBA out and show the judge that Kodak's patents were worthless?
Because it wasn't the Judge they had to convince. They had to convince a Rochester jury that the area's largest employer, Kodak, was full of it.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
OK. Java. I saw a Usenet posting one time a long time ago, that expressed an opinion about Java that I really haven't heard in many other places. But it helps explain why Java, properly done, properly implemented, is an extremely powerful thing.
Looking at it from a single OS perspective, it goes like this. You have Linux, for instance. So along comes Java, and it places this huge, clunky, more or less proprietary, what used to be very inefficient and slow but has now gotten better code between you and Linux (or BSD, or Windows, or System V, or whatever). So now I can run a Java-based web browser - a Java-based FTP client that is how many times slower than the same application written in C or C++ for Linux. Linux has everything necessary to develop software for itself - why would someone come along and plop this gigantic layer of functionality between the end-user/programmer and the software development tools for Linux that duplicates functionality that already exists? Java is, in its nature, or at least, it can be, an evil thing.
Java takes steps towards making the underlying OS irrelevant. Say for instance, you have a Java Desktop System - and it works well, people are happy with it - and it runs on Linux. Well, you can transparently remove the Linux part and replace it with something else, say, like Solaris. I am not saying that Sun does that, or that Sun is evil-intentioned or anything - it's just the concept, the potential that Java has in the long term to making the OS irrelevant. When something like that is tied to one particular company they had better expect that any and all potential patent holders are going to start coming out of the woodwork. Java has incredible potential - at least in theory - perhaps even greater potential than Windows - at least in theory. Apparently that's good enough for the legal department to do something.
One would think that if software were written in a portable fashion in any portable programming language, that something like Java would be unnecessary. One would think that if internet and other standards and protocols were platform-neutral and were adhered to something like Java would be unnecessary. But in any case, Java is there, and it has some incredible potential. Java has the ability to ooze its way into any OS, any platform, any application - that can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing - it depends on the person implementing that power and whether that power is being used for personal or corporate gain or for the greater good.
In any case, Java has incredible potential. It is not some small helpless corporation trying to get started, now being destroyed by opportunistic patent pool meanies. Java would have even greater potential if it could be broken loose from Sun and released into the public domain. Whether or not what Kodak has done will come any closer to having that occur is doubtful, but the fact remains that Java is powerful and has incredible potential and anything that is powerful and has incredible potential is going to cause patent holders to emerge out of the woodwork.
Java is a big deal. It's important. That's probably one of the reasons this is happening.
Yes, the telephone company developed UNIX. Yes, Microsoft is branching out into "entertainment and media". No, the two are not remotely the same. Yes, they both make sense.
AT&T was a natural user of computer systems. They invented the packet switched network for long distance telephone calling. It only makes sense that they should be interested in computers since their network (on that scale) was not possible without them. Even discounting billing (no pun intended) the fact is that computers are an absolute necessity for switched networks.
Microsoft, on the other hand, develops software. Are you aware that computer gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry? That's not even counting merchandising toys and shit. Meanwhile, Microsoft's primary business is making money. They have the resources to do computer games. Meanwhile people are demanding that their computers do all kinds of media shit so it kind of makes sense that Microsoft should move into media.
The two situations are not at all congruent. AT&T got into operating systems because they had to build the tools to do the job - the tools simply didn't exist before then. Microsoft got into entertainment software because it was a logical progression from what they were already doing. In fact you might say that the two companies' situations are direct opposites.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You should read the patents before you post your "prior art". None of these would be prior art. The patents discuss an object management system. In the system are typed objects which are operated upon by "object managers". The objects are instantiated using the prototype pattern and are manipulated by use of the "object manager".
Frankly, I'm surprised that Sun lost this court case. Frankly, I can't quite see how Java infringes on these patents. CORBA looks much closer. Maybe they are really talking about Java Beans???
I'd like to see some technical commentary on this. Something doesn't smell right.
However, given that Smalltalk was the original object oriented language, it would seem to me that their methods for effecting operations on objects predate those claimed in the patent. That is, an object represents a data type which has code fragments associated with the datatype.
The patent claims to be innovative in that it applies operators/operations to a composite datatype as opposed to atomic datatypes which reside on a given architecture (int, real, etc.)
If smalltalk supported composite objects, some variant of it optimized object operations, which implies to me an implementation in a VM.
(Now i'd better go back and study the Kodak patents. Sigh, and i wanted to get some real work done.)
Agent Orange was 2,4,5,T, along with some 2,4,D.
You can still get 2,4,D (Crossbow). Together with Roundup, it's a pretty potent combination against tough perenials like blackberries, poison ivy, etc.
Roundup (glyphosate), while originally developed by Monsanto, doesn't have much to do with 2,4,D other than association.
The patents on Roundup have expired. There are plenty of non-Roundup packagings of glyphosate as well as 2,4,D.
Good luck boycotting GMOs. Better stop buying vegetable oil, anything with soybeans, fresh tomatoes, etc. Chances are, the soybeans, corn and canola seed are Roundup-Ready (GMO'd to be resistant to Roundup) or otherwise GMO'd, the tomatoes are GMO'd to be more frost resistant, etc.
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.
The 14n is like a poster-child for all of Kodak's cameras. Too little too late.
Random and weird software I've written.
Most FORTHs don't assemble to raw machine code. They actually generate an easy to execute code. Called direct-threaded, token-threaded(same as byte code), subroutine-threaded or indirect-threaded.
Sun should be aware of this because OpenFirmware is a direct-threaded FORTH.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There must be some nuance to this, because the prior art is really old, and very clearly applicable. Does anyone but me remeber the UCSD P-System? It compiled Pascal to an intermediate language (P-Code) which was then run by a platform-specific runtime that interpreted the code. This all happened around 1980. Another fine patent, and a bunch of rich lawyers.
Does this mean that libraries are protected under this patent? I have applications that "ask" zlib for compression "help", so could they sue me (and theoretically every software developer on the planet), right? It just seems a little silly to me...
This means that word document file .doc is asking for help from Word.EXE?
Any program files are asking for help from their program...
Oh, BTW, and program is asking for help from the Operating System....
This is ridiculous!!!
Whenever I make a function call, it's actually one "piece of software asking for help" from another piece of software.
I wonder how much money Kodak can make from having essentially patented the function-call mechanism.
> Sorry, but not every site has the same purposes as /.
Thank god. But when 50% of the "discussion" is hundreds of cheap Darl Sucks posts, yet substantial non-groupthink material is deleted, you have to wonder what PJ's strategy is.
Be responsible in the internte age, this comes up under a google news search:
/. is passive in Java stories and on the whole undermines my faith in /. ability to bring the news that does matter in an unbiased way - this isn't a gripe at the content of /., but if you are going to be listed as a news source, you shoudl act like one, or follow the google links to make sure you are not mis-represented on thier site
Kodak Wins $1 Billion Java Lawsuit
This is wrong, even reporters of the reporting of news should adhere to some seblance of truth and get the title correct.
They have not won a $1Billion lawsuit, they have a ruling for thier arguments, and will try and settle for this ammount.
The way in which
Either change the title to something more correct, or remove yourself from google, and enjoy your ability to be less responsible. Just my 0.00.0002
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com