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Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent
kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."
I congratulated him on the several patents he just acquired. Although I can't say I was very happy about his recent moves.
My work here is dung.
Breaking a query into pieces and evaluating them at nodes containing a subset of the database has been written about since the 1970s. I read about it in grad school back then. Whether that's actually the thing actually patented by jarg is an entirely separate question. If it is, the PTO has screwed up once again. If it isn't, then perhaps there is a deeper similarity that TFA isn't describing.
If a north eastern company has to sue a north western company in a Texas court because they're more friendly to patent litigation then you're dealing with a patent troll.
We had a system in our office in 1985 that distributed records for each table to N processors via a hash function, where N could be a large as you liked. Queries were sent to all nodes and run in parallel, and the results combined (since SQL is set based, this works perfectly). Queries on any size database could be made arbitrarily fast by adding more nodes. The only bottle neck was the band width to the control processor and any order by clauses, which was proportional to the result set size, not the database size.
The /. posts labeling Northeastern University as a patent troll or claiming that the patent should not have issued have been posted too quickly to be credible assessments of the morality of this suit and the worthiness of the patent. The current Wikipedia definition is that a patent troll is "a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic." If the patent was obtained through lawful and ethical means, is valid, and is infringed on by Google, then how is it "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" for Northeastern University to enforce the patent?
Some argue that a patent troll is merely a person or company that seeks to enforce a patent but does not practice the patent. Maybe Northeastern University is not practicing the patent. Then again, the mission of most universities seems to be conducting research, not applying and commercializing research. Licensing research to companies that can and will apply and commercialize that research is one way that universities fund additional research. Maybe universities should have to give all of their research away for free. But currently they do not. And it seems unfair to fault Northeastern for exercising its rights while not pushing the scope of its mission.
Given how quickly Northeastern was accused of being a patent troll, and given that there was no discussion about the proper role of universities or any real analysis of the worthiness of the patent (which was filed in 1994...almost 4 years before Google was founded), it seems likely that some people consider a patent troll to be any person who tries to enforce any patent rights.
Maybe Northeastern is acting like a patent troll. And maybe their patent is worthless. But it takes more than a quick glance at the 20-page issued patent or the 6-page complaint against Google to come up with a reasonable assessment of these issues.
Some analysis of the complaint would at least show that it doesn't look like Northeastern really knows the details of Google's search infrastructure:
Then again, Google's code is not open to the world. If it was, more detailed analysis would be possible. How can Northeastern try to get access to the code? By suing and demanding it as part of discovery. Does this make Northeastern a patent troll? Maybe. But the alternative (aside from discarding the patent system altogether, at least for software innovations) is a system that rewards patent infringers who keep their source code inaccessible to patent holders.
Aside from obviousness, the idea has been around forever. nCube built a business around it in the early 80's.
They have no competing product, they're hiring lawyers on a contingency basis, they're filing in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas based on the most stretched association with that venue and they've demanded a jury trial and an injunction up front. They're basically trying to force Google to make the suit go away and they're just rolling the dice to see if they get lucky.
Looks like a patent troll, sounds like a patent troll, smells like a patent troll. They're not going to be able to claim damages for lost profits. The only difference between these people and a typical dedicated patent troll IP firm is that they don't employ their own lawyers and they make some shitty, unrelated product that really has no relevance to this case.
"Reality is that there's a lot of things that are "obvious" in hindsight ""
Dividing the search up among multiple machines if one
machine is not enough is pretty obvious. And not just
in hindsight.
"but who gets to say so?"
I see the problem, but I don't think we should allow that
as an excuse for such things.
emt 377 emt 4