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Sun To Seek Injunction, Damages Against NetApp
Zeddicus_Z writes to note that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined Sun's response to Network Appliance's recent patent infringement lawsuit over ZFS: "As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license — on which Network Appliance was started. In addition... we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform... [Regarding NetApp's demands in order to drop its existing case against Sun:] ...[to] unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community, and to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers — and to forbid its use in storage devices."
Try to do something new,or innovative, and out come the lawsuits. Only the megacorps like Sun can really compete in the minefield that is software anymore. If we can get rid of the foolish software patents, and get copyright back into a reasonable time frame, maybe the US can get back to being an innovator, instead of merely a lawyers paradise.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
For me, quite a lot. I'm wanting to start up a software house some time in the next year. These patent wars frankly wory me. I don't know if I'd be that keen on entering the US market, since some shark will no doubt try to take a bite if my product is seen to be making money. Better to work in Europe and the far east methinks.
Yeah, software piracy is a tad rife there, but I'd rather be strategising against pirates (services instead of software payment etc), than have my company gutted because of some shitbar patent suit in texas.
What NetApp did was to patent a method of mapping data in a file system. What they should have been made to do by the USPTO was patent their implementation of a method of mapping data in a file system. It's a subtle but important difference.
To draw an analogy to something a little more obvious we should look to the drug industry. Many people believe that patenting drugs shouldn't be allowed, what should be allowed are patents on the method of making the drug. If someone can think of a way to get the same end result using a different process they should be allowed to do just that. Having a system that allows companies to hold patents on what amount of sequences of data is silly.
The same should go for software. It's fine to patent a specific implementation of some code, but it's not fine for that patent to cover every conceivable way of achieving the same end result.
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Actually I was just trying to be funny.
The reality is that the mega patent holders. IBM Sun and even Microsoft tend not to run out and file patent lawsuits to stop innovation but rather as a defensive measure to protect their business from litigious none innovative parasites.
NetApp isn't the worst of the bunch since they still have viable products on the market. Unfortunately they are so panicked over the possibility that we may use PC Servers with huge piles of massive SATA drives at a total cost way below the stuff they are selling.
If only they were able to come up with new products when someone else innovates enough to make what they are selling today a commodity.
So no offence to Sun but hey we should be able to make fun of our friends too.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That's how patents are supposed to work: in return for the temporary protection of a patent, you have to reveal exactly how your invention works in the patent application, so that everyone can copy it once the patent has run out.
Maybe patent applications should be examined by qualified people to see if they can be implimented using only the information supplied in the application together with that already in the public domain.
Okay, so what are you going to do? Sue Sun?
If so, you'd better hope that there's nothing in Sun's patent portfolio that you're infringing upon. The way software patents have gotten these days, it's a pretty fair bet that NetApp runs afoul of at least a few of Sun's 14,000 patents.
To reassure folks internally, Dave appeals to ignorance:
There's always a first time. And maybe that's what it will take to reform the system. While Sun can wave the F/OSS flag as they battle NetApp, they will end up proving a few scary points about the current state of the patent system:
1) If a company tries to use software patents the way they were intended, it will only be successful against companies smaller than themselves. The big boys will insist on a portfolio exchange; if that fails, one party will end up looking like SCO.
2) The only way to get money out of the "big infringers" is to have a company with zero liability of patent infringement, such as one with a litigation-based business model.
3) Software patents are a barrier to entry for small companies, and a perpetual liability.
The problem is that "copyright" and the logical extension of "patenting" physical objects are the same thing.
You don't copyright a stove, because people can't just copy it. You patent it, and now people can't build an identical stove, even if they could build something very stovelike. But with software, you copyright the software, and now people can't copy it. Patenting would, in theory, fulfill the exact same purpose - "you can't build the identical software" - and that's software patents are kind of bizarre and shouldn't even exist.
Instead, though, patents are being treated as "one step up from copyright" - you can't build an identical stove, and you "can't build software that does the same thing". Which isn't the equivalent of patents at all. It's more the equivalent of a concept monopoly. If software patents were imported right back into the physical world, you'd have people able to put patent on "cars", or "stoves", as an entire class of thing.
I don't think software patents need to be "fixed". I don't think they need to be "abolished". I think what's necessary is realization that the entire concept of "software patent" doesn't even make sense, and that there really is no parallel with the physical world here.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.