Linux Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat/Novell

walterbyrd writes "Just months after the last nail in SCO's case, and on the same day as Red Hat's brave words about patent intimidation, a company filed the first patent suit against the Linux operating system. IP Innovation LLC filed the claim against Red Hat and Novell over U.S. Patent No. 5,072,412. PJ points out there is prior art here: 'You might recall the patent was used in litigation against Apple in April 2007, and Beta News reported at the time that it's a 1991 Xerox PARC patent. But Ars Technica provided the detail that it references earlier patents going back to 1984.'"

Comments

If this doesn't stop EU swpatents nothing will

[javilon]

After this attack, it is clear that changing the EU law and allowing software patents becomes much more difficult.

There are lots of people in EU using linux distributions without any legal concerns that would be very damaged the very day that EU suddenly recognizes this troll patent.

But wait...

[gillbates]

So you mean that making a patent deal with Microsoft doesn't really protect Novell from patent infringment suits? Well, isn't that the strangest thing...

I think Novell is about to figure out that no matter how you look at it, they got the short end of the stick in the Microsoft deal. They paid a lot of money so that firms other than Microsoft could sue them for patent infringement. Wonder if they'll just pay off this company like they did Microsoft. Wonder if they can afford to pay off all of the companies that will bring patent infringement suits against them.

What a way to paint a big, red, sue-me-for-patent-infringement-target on their company.

Re:Follow the money

[TechForensics]

You're modded funny, but you're right on the money. This is a new attack from Microsoft as the Groklaw article makes plain. The interesting question is why MS is doing this by proxy, i.e., using straw men they encourage and abet. I seem to recall one provision of the GPL is that if you sue, you lose all rights to GPL code (and surely MS infringes that in places more than OSS tramples on MS patents, if at all). Microsoft is therefore avoiding losing those rights by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.

However, there is a principle in law (or Equity) that one cannot do indirectly what he cannot do directly. An interesting question for practicing lawyers (I am a retired one and not up on all of this) would be, is there a way to attribute the Plaintiff's actions to Microsoft, canceling their GPL rights? Would it in fact be too late to do this based on their provable support of SCO (the massive loans arranged by MS to keep SCO afloat)? I'd sure like to hear what Eben Moglen has to say about this.