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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."
And people laugh at me when I say the stock market is nothing but a legalized casino.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Okay so a program asks for help from another program. I guess the internet now belongs to Kodak!
I do not welcome this.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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
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.
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";
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?
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.
"Kodak praised the verdict and said it was part of an aggressive push to convert innovations -- both homegrown and purchased -- into real money. The company over the past several years has been issuing licenses, filing lawsuits, forming spinoff companies and finding other uses for its technologies."
It seems that today, companies don't produce products, they produce lawsuits, and that's how they get their money. How long can this continue?
Furthermore, since 1.06B is about 1/3 of Sun's cash on hand (here), what will that mean for Sun? It's 7% of their total value, so this can't be good for them.
In the end, it's only the lawyers who win.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
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.
First the Eolas lawsuit, now this. What is going to take for Bill Gates to wake up and say that suing OpenOffice developers isn't worth being able to lose $1.06B to a company that actually has the legal resources to wage a protracted war with Microsoft? If Sun loses this, the Microsoft had better be willing to settle in a very generous was or Kodak will go after them. $1.06B for Sun, since Microsoft has much, much more money it could just as easily be $5B from Microsoft.
This is all starting to become like nuclear weapons in and after the cold war. First it seemed like no big deal, hell it was even a requirement to be a big player to have nukes. Now all these little players are getting them, and Eolas and Kodak IMO are no different or better than the rogue states getting their own arsenals of nukes. Now the big boys are getting attacked so, what do they do? Disarm by pushing for the elimination of all software and business method patents, to keep these guys from having legal nukes to use against them, or do they just pray that not enough ankle biters will get enough patents to bankrupt them in independent and coordinated lawsuits?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This seems quite similar to how scripts work in Unix-land. If you're writing a script in the KornShell language, you put the "#!/bin/ksh" header on the first line of the script. When the script runs, it asks for help from /bin/ksh to execute. Surely that concept has been around longer than this absurd patent?
Isn't this not just prior art, but also blindingly obvious?
Either of those would be enough to invalidate the patent...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
See, that's why c will never die--not from tradition, nostalgia or speed. From now on, to avoid liability, the linux startup scripts will have to be written in precompiled c (thanks to the wonderful #! symbol). I welcome our new patent-holding overlords!
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
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.
I saw the headline, and do you know what my first reaction was? It wasn't "grrr. Stupid software patents". That came later. My very FIRST reaction was to look for the foot. Because obviously Kodak pursuing software patent claims is absurd. No foot, so I read the article.
I'm not a patent lawyer, and I have better things to do with my time than try to decipher the deliberately-obfuscated language of a patent the article doesn't bother to mention. However, I do know a little bit about computers, and that patent better be a damn sight more specific than "ask for help".
Because I'll bet system calls predate whatever patent Kodak's waving around.
I'm still looking for that foot, only now I want one to kick Kodak in the head.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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...
First, after damages are decided, Sun will move with JNOV (asking the judge to set aside the verdict because there was insufficent evidence to support to verdict). There is probably a 10% probability of this happening in any given case, even more when there is alot of money at risk.
Second, Sun will appeal to the Federal Circuit, which usually overturnes 60% of district court decisions because district courts usually dont know anything about technology and know even less about patent law.
So, IMHO, its too early to start running around in circles over this decision, at least until the Federal Circuit affirms.
Patent reform will not happen until it becomes unprofitable for large companies to have them as they are today. I see Kodak like a rouge nation. They once were like the other sovereign, stable, and knowing that if they launched a patent war the other side would retaliate in kind, with the most likely solution to cross license each other's portfolio. This sort of thinking fails when the attacking company has nothing to lose. SCO is not really a good example of this. The stock was going downhill fast, so about a two years ago they came up with a brilliant pump and dump scheme. They don't actually care about winning the case. (IBM lobed the patent counter attack anyhow, to scorch the earth) Kodak does, however, and cannot easily be litigated into extinction.
I don't see patents going away, but I could see the bar being raised for what qualifies for 'patent' protection and eliminating some of those pesky submarine style techniques. But not until someone has nothing to gain from cross licensing. The IE plugin was close, but they lacked the law staff (not to say anything about right or wrong) to keep the patent valid....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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.
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.
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.
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
The previous story is true, I guess coffee IS addictive!
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 don't see how Smalltalk isn't direct prior art for this, at least as it would apply to Java. These are, I believe, a good example of bad software patents that are becoming more and more common. You can't really figure out what exactly they're claiming, you have no idea what might infringe on it, it's so vague that you can't figure out what prior art might invalidate it, and once you do figure it out, you say "you can patent that?". It's like patenting "Ok, take an automobile, turn right and go around the block THREE times, not just TWO times like everyone has done in the past, THEN turn right on red without waiting for pedestrians." And then claiming that airplanes landing between 2AM and 3AM at airports without lights infringes on it, since they never wait for pedestrians, and they have a red light on the wing.
What hangs on a wall, is green, and whistles?
I give up. What hangs on a wall, is green, and whistles?
A HERRING!
A herring? It doesn't hang on a wall!
Well, you can put in a nail and hang it.
Ok, but it isn't green!
You can paint it green.
Ok, but whistles?
Oh, I just put that in to make it hard!
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?
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.
Wheee, I forgot an entire paragraph.
To boycott Monsanto, avoid buying NutriSweet (particularly Equal), Roundup (the son of Agent Orange and granson of DDT), any Ortho lawncare products. Also, avoid any food made with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's); many of them are Monsanto GMO's, and the other GMO's aren't any better.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Uh buddy, python is byte-compiled. What do you think all those .pyc files are? Python droppings?
Whenever you start a python program, "python" first checks if there is a byte-compiled version of the program. If there isn't, it compiles it - and the next time you start the proggie, the startup times will be smaller. If you bothered to look around, you might have even noticed such projects as the optimizing python compiler (which tries to optimize the Py bytecode), or IronPython which targets CIL/.Net instead of pycode/Python-VM.
Their contact form
I told them that I'd never buy another Kodak product again as long as I live... and I'm dead serious about it.
Ok, so my first thought was like: oh, shit! Shit shit shit sheeeeet! What the fuck? Fuckity fuckity-fucking fuck!
.NET, Perl, PHP, Python, VB, and C/C++ debuggers, aren't many of them VMs? Lisp, ML, Scheme, Prolog, and more. So what is going to happen, all VMs will have to pay royalty to Kodak?
But then I thought: Ok, keep it together, for f..ck sake!
Ok and now I am like again: arrghh FUCK!
I don't know, I just want to see that little piece of shit Kodak in ruins, that's what I want to see.
And it has nothing to do with Sun or Java, it's everything. I am so fucking tired of this fucked up life and little scum sucking shit eating pieces of trash that live on this planet who run 'businesses' like kodak.
Since when is kodak a software company? They are not. They bought this patent from another company.
On the other hand the court that made this decision must consist of the dumbest assholes ever. Ever. Unfucking believable.
---
Ok, now that I vented. Such a rulling was foreseen by many, there is a reason why IBM has something like a million pattents in their war chest, including a patent for using a crapper.
Obviously now companies started using software patents in the worst way possible - attempting to destroy entire industries.
What will Sun do now with Java? I don't know, they must appeal and hopefully take it to the highest court and get this decision overturned and hopefully they will achieve a reform of the software pattenting, as in prove it to be detrimental to the economy in principle and to any company in particular. Obviously a smaller company would just go under, this war has to be fought by gigantic companies like Sun, IBM or even Microsoft. How many patents can Microsoft fight off, especially if the attacker is NOT a software vendor. How do you fight a non software vendor? They don't care about software in principle, I suppose Kodak would WANT all software to be gone. After all, all they need is chemicals to run their shop.
On the other hand I don't see IBM or MS helping Sun in this battle, they are compatitors after all. But Java will suffer enormously and so may
This is a serious issue, I think this has to be the most serious issue that hit software industry ever, patents I mean.
Software should not be patentable. Copyrights are fine and dandy but patents are something else all together. Patents of ideas are much worse than copyrights of implementations. Software patents will without any doubt ruin software industry and the economies that allow software patents will pay a heavy price. I think it is time to support EFF more than ever. I think we need to see a wide range of law suits against Kodak one way or another and try and get the court to overthrow software patents.
And I think that Freeing Java is becoming more important than ever for the [Java] platform.
You can't handle the truth.
a patent which describes a way for a piece of software to "ask for help" from another application
.. give me the value of .. sub f { $x = shift; return $x^2 + x + 1 }... f(x)=x^2+x+1
Ask for help
OMG! Kodak has a patent on mathematics!
Shit!
"Jurors ruled that Sun's Java web software
infringes the patents, which were acquired
by Eastman Kodak Co. in 1997"
"Three patents once registered to Lowell
minicomputer-maker Wang Laboratories"
There are two things I can say about the above:
1. Sun should've bought Wang Lab, but didn't.
2. Kodak's luck isn't that bad, after all.
One question:
Anyone know how much Kodak paid for the
acquisition of Wang Lab, back in 1997 ?
Thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If you dislike Sun for just owning software patents, you should dislike just about every tech company that exists. Practically every company nowadays owns some bogus set of software patents, and companies like IBM (who regularly receives the most patent grants worldwide every year), own huge software patent portfolios. Fortunately, most of these companies (including Sun) don't go around abusing these bogus patents left and right in billion dollar lawsuits.
Companies are never going to stop patenting software as long as it can be done, and there will always be rotten apples abusing the system, so we need to stop this problem at its roots. New case law needs to be arrived at, or new legislation needs to be passed, to kill software patents.
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
"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"
More usefully, we could do with a system where all new inventions aren't automatically banned from use for the next 25 years at the option of the inventor
I am a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. I write C++ code every day. I know at least 7 programming languages well enough to program in them professionally. For my research I design new computer hardware, compilers, database systems, and operating systems. I have helped write (non-software) patents. ...and I'll be damned if I can fully understand the text of most patents, including the ones cited in this article. How in the world is a software developer supposed to avoid infringing on patents if they can't _understand_ them? I don't know of any school which includes a course on "reading patent legaleese" in their computer science programs.
I have 12 years of post-high-school education in Computer Science. I have no idea how to write a non-trivial program that I am relatively sure does not infringe on any patent. I don't know anyone who does. Doesn't this seem absurd?
So if this patent is on the distributed systems middleware aspects, there's certainly likely to be prior art.
Software is math.
I've heard this said many times and quite frankly feel it is a over generalization of the case.
Lonath's post equates abstract algorithms and useful mathematical algorithms without ever identifying how software fits into the picture. Supposedly, "software is math" as stated above, and therefore, software is nothing but an abstract way of writing a mathematical algorithm which can be assigned numbers and solved using mathematical operations. Given this, it would be reasonable to assume that all software can be reduced to an equation which gives a final result. Given this, I ask you what the equation would be for the amazon one-click shopping software would be?
There are lots of computer science problems which do not occur in mathematics. For example data structures, process execution scheduling, garbage collection. Granted these make use of mathematics, but that does not make them pure mathematical problems.
IANAL, nor do I play one here, but the word seems to be that "function" vs. "implementation" matters for copyright but not patents
The question above was about "functional equivelants". If you want to use mathimatics as an example, two equations can both produce the answer of "1", but do using vastly different methods (i.e. subtraction vs. integration). The question in most patents is not the final result, but the method used to get there.
I would also argue that patents protect implementations of ideas, rather than ideas themselves. For example, the idea of compressing music is well known, but there are many implementations of that idea which are patented. However, this seems to be more of a semantics issue. Though, I am curious as to how the writter of the Groklaw post would define "ideas" and "application" in the above context.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
That patent seems to cover anything that implements a dynamic method send based on the classes of both objects, and supports any kind of "marshalling" operation to allow separately compiled components to interact.
Since Java's class system isn't dynamic, there's no reason to expect that it would apply. I didn't think the JVM even supported the operation described in Claim 1. On the other hand it sure looks like the method send operation in Smalltalk-80, and the patent uses the Smalltalk-80 book as a reference. About the only thing in this patent that Smalltalk-80 doesn't cover would be something like dynamic linking.
The article is really skimpy on details, where's the actual explanation of HOW Java violates this patent?
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.
Yes. We call this the Church-Turing thesis, and it is one of the most fundamental theorems in computer science.
Given this, it would be reasonable to assume that all software can be reduced to an equation which gives a final result.
No. Not all problems are decidable (and hence the equation produced may not give a final result), and it is provable that it is not possible to determine in the general case whether an algorithm will halt or not (although it is in many specific cases). This is known as the halting problem, which has been known about for almost as long as computer science has existed as a discipline (it was discovered by Alan Turing)
Given this, I ask you what the equation would be for the amazon one-click shopping software would be?
I don't have a copy of Amazon's one-click shopping software's code to hand, but if I did, and could be bothered to devote the time to it, then yes I could. Perhaps you should read this book.
There are lots of computer science problems which do not occur in mathematics. For example data structures, process execution scheduling, garbage collection.
Abstract data types are part of mathematical type theory. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with branches of mathematics such as typed lambda calculus? Process execution scheduling is an application of process algebra. Garbage collection is an application of graph theory, specifically the detection of nodes from a graph that are not connected to a root node.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...
Wow. Are you for real?
Everything a computer does is fundamentally described with binary numbers and logic gates - all math.
"...could you then simply enter that mathematical formula into a computer and have it function in the same way..."
Sure. But it probably wouldn't be the type of equation you'd recognize - we're not talking about some three-line polynomial here. We're talking however many thousands of lines of equation which mathematically describe the automata taking in all the input you describe and giving the desired output.
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.
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.
The idea of patents has to be legally revised or done away with. I can see protecting the IP of persons with specific code someone has developed, or even an algorithm, but a software concept? Come on.
I believe it is the right of every hacker, developer, and engineer to tinker or reverse engineer code and devices computer, mechanic, or otherwise. Thats how competition is created and inovation is born. I mean what if no one but Ford could create cars or Sony could create walkmen. We would all be driving in Model Ts listening to 15 minutes of music on tapes the size of a betamax cassettes in car radios (Mono I might Add) that take up the entire trunk.
Washington is going to have to get hip to this soon. All code (open or otherwise) could be subject to the enforcement of vague patents files years ago by some company hoping to hit the lotto or have someone develop for them for free. I didn't get all the patent fuss in Europe before but I see it now. This could drive the software business out of the US in my opinion. But hell, I also though Auto-Man was a great TV series.
And that's what I think.
...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.
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
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