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NetApp Hits Sun With Patent Infringement Lawsuit
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reports, "Network Appliance Inc. today announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking unspecified compensatory damages and an injunction that would prohibit Sun from developing or distributing products based on its ZFS file system technology. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin, Texas, charges that the Sun ZFS technology infringes on seven NetApp patents pertaining to data processing systems and related software.""
How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences." Patents don't do anything to benefit the public. Patents were fine in an era before the need for capital became its own barrier to entry in a given market, but, any more, they are not only a relic, but a dangerous, anti-competitive one. Would it be a troll to say anyone who is in favor of patents is really in favor of oligarchy?
This is my sig.
...appears on The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/05/netapp_sue s_sun_over_zfs/
This actually mentions the specific technologies NetApp is alleging are infringed, and contains a link to the actual complaint, which lists the details of NetApp's allegations.
Cursory reading suggests these are somewhat reasonable patents--they solve non-obvious critical issues in terms of having data synchronized across multiple images. We're not talking about "One-Click Ordering" here.
That said, they filed in East Texas, which is a notorious district for patent trolling, which doesn't help them appear on the side of the angels IMO.
Here is the original complaint (PDF): http://www.netapp.com/go/ipsuit/spider-complaint.p df .
... the first commercial file system to use the copy-on-write tree of blocks approach to file system consistency." One of the first patents I filed at NetApp describes this "copy-on-write tree of blocks" technique in detail.
And here is NetApp's boss blog: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/ (quoted below):
This morning, NetApp filed an IP (intellectual property) lawsuit against Sun. It has two parts. The first is a "declaratory judgment", asking the court to decide whether we infringe a set of patents that Sun claims we do. The second says that Sun infringes several of our patents with its ZFS technology.
How did we get here?
Like many large technology companies, Sun has been using its patent portfolio as a profit center. About 18 months ago, Sun's lawyers contacted NetApp with a list of patents they say we infringe, and requested that we pay them lots of money. We responded in two ways. First, we closely examined their list of patents. Second, we identified the patents in our portfolio that we believe Sun infringes.
With respect to Sun's patent claims, our lawsuit explains that we do not infringe, and - in fact - that they are not even valid. As a result, we don't think we should be paying Sun millions of dollars.
On the flip side, our suit points out that Sun's ZFS appears to infringe several of NetApp's WAFL patents. It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights. Here's what creators of ZFS have to say: "The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself, is WAFL
We filed suit against Sun because after we pointed out the WAFL patents, their lawyers stopped getting back to us. The first part of our suit is a declaratory judgment. It's complicated, but the basic idea is that Sun claims we infringe their patents, so we are requesting a trial to show that's not true. In essence, a declaratory judgment calls their bluff. It allows us to force a legal conclusion, rather than leaving this threat hanging over our heads. The second part is a complaint against Sun for infringing several WAFL patents with ZFS.
That's the whole point. If I invent a product, chances are, in order to really get it out, I will probably wind up infringing on someone else's patent in order to get a complete solution.
For example, let's say I have a revolutionary new programming language. Great stuff, but, ultimately, it will need a bunch of existing technologies to make it work. I'll need parse trees, string manipulations, code generation, and hey, why not an IDE, all of which are covered by a bazillion patents already.
So, if I bring my product to market, the best I can possibly hope for is a cross licensing agreement with a major player, and that in turn, means they can crush me. Or, they can work around my patent in some way, still get the feature, and crush me. Patents don't protect ideas, unless you have a lot of very good patent attorneys and those cost big bucks.
In the world of machines, this doesn't happen. If I invent a new kind of a screw, its pretty obvious that the screw is a patentable thing. But software doesn't exist at that level of componentry and most likely never will. It simply can't. Software wants to integrate and to some extent, that makes it unique from the physical world. You don't need to integrate a particular kind of screw into every single socket and with every single tool, but ultimately, with software, you do wind up having to talk to every kind of protocol, database, and GUI, and in doing so, you wind up flying into a hailstorm of patents.
Seriously, when's the last time anyone has actually checked to see if they infringe before they write something? Only a big company can really afford to do it. Face it, the idea of a little guy with a software patent is a myth, 95% of the time, and its simply not worth the cost to the rest of us - even if we work in a big corporation.
This is my sig.
The day gravity is an artificial man-made creation, something that is fully within man's ability to "make go away," your statement will be fine. For now, though, our control over Gravity is quite limited, whereas sufficiently well-placed discussions could in fact change the patent system. Perhaps not arguing about it on /. alone, no, but if you can bring the issue to the general (less-educated) public's attention, you may very well change it through discussion. The current problem with fixing the patent system is, almost in its entirety, the sheer lack of discussion.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire