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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.'"