Sun and Kodak Settle Out of Court

prostoalex writes "The patent dispute between Eastman Kodak and Sun Microsystems in regards to three patents that EK claimed Sun was violating with Java, came to an end. Thursday afternoon Associated Press announced the companies settled out of court with terms of the deal unclear yet. Before Eastman Kodak was looking for $1.06 billion in damages."

Comments

Re:HOW Much?!

[jwind]

I think you hit it on the head... Kodak in the crapper? YUP! Kodak and companies alike in the Photo/Film business are trying to grap a piece of the computer (especially software) market in anyway possible. Why? who needs film anymore? Consumer? commercial? nope.

Thats it then

[Paul Johnson]

These patents (5,206,951, 5,421,012 and 5,226,161) are so basic, they cover large amounts of OO software. According to this decision, Kodak now owns CORBA, COM, large parts of Linux, Apache, and pretty much every other large piece of software ever written.

According to the Groklaw discussion, the jury trial came from a town where Kodak is one of the two main employers. One can only suspect that this may have swayed the jury.

This is definitely a case for PubPat to tackle. There has got to be significant prior art on these patents.

To anyone thinking of looking, prior art must fulfil the following requirements (IANAL):

1. It must precede the submission of the patent.
2. It must be published. Open source should do fine. So should any kind of academic textbook or paper. Closed source doesn't count unless the technique was specifically described in the documentation or some similar published work.
3. It must be specific. Saying "Unix had this in 1980" doesn't count. Saying "This was described in section 3.4 of Programming Objects in FOO by J Random Academic in 1980" does count.
4. It must cover the same ground as the claims. Suppose that the candidate prior art had been published today. Would it infringe the patent? If so, then its prior art that invalidates the patent. Otherwise its irrelevant.

   Paul.