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Red Hat Hit With Patent Suit Over JBoss
An anonymous reader writes "A small software company is claiming that Red Hat's JBoss open source middleware violates one of its patents and is asking a court to stop Red Hat from distributing the product. Software Tree LLC claims that JBoss infringes on its database patent for 'exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and a relational system.' Software Tree's partners include Microsoft, and that the suit was filed in Eastern Texas, which is known as a plaintiff's paradise for patent actions."
East Texas is a hell hole.
Cool. Let JBoss know about this to pass on to their defence lawyers. Won't do any good here.
Considering how old OO languages are, and how old relational databases are, and how TRIVIAL O/R mapping is, there is probably a plethora of 80s prior art, but it can't hurt.
Only their website doesn't even mention Microsoft as a partner. IBM, Borland, Sun and Oracle are mentioned as partners, though, with contact details.
What was the intention of mentioning Microsoft and leaving out those partners? Is Microsoft a business partner at all?
I hate software patents. But summaries like this blatantly trying to skew facts to weasel in hints of a grand Microsoft conspiracy does the fight against software patents disservice.
What a crook. Bad! I had to look twice because I fully expected this to be a "kdawson". Not this time, though.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
do these people ever think, what will the public perception about their own products, website, whatever software they produced and will produce in future, be in the underground scene ? after they do this stunt ?
i mean, this is basically like raising a flag saying 'im an enemy of open source, come, get me'. EVEN if you are not.
underground scene doesnt hesitate from taking down fbi, cia, nasa, whatever web sites, and they produce a lot more viruses, trojans to hamper the companies perceived as 'evil'.
this even plagues microsoft. what will such a perception do to a small software company which does not have the resources to cope up with such setbacks ?
very stupid move in my opinion. internet is made of people. and people decide what's good or what's bad. if they decide that you are bad or evil, you are in deep trouble.
noone can fight 'the people'. regardless of what laws or rules of ethics or whatever philosophy says. you put out laws, if people think they are unfair or invalid, they dont obey them. you shell out punishments, yet they still disobey them. you say something is unethical or immoral, but people still do them. the people define what's moral, what's immoral, what's to do and what's not to do. you cant fight that.
Read radical news here
The question of which jurisdiction a business can be sued in is complicated, and depends on a lot of factors and tests. But basically, in federal court, you can generally sue a business wherever it does business, or whever the incident giving rise to the litigation occurred. The party being sued can try to change the venue, but the grounds would be something like, there's a better venue where more witnesses are located or something like that. Arguing that the jurisdiction is "plaintiff's paradise" won't pass muster.
If you're a large software company and you sell your software in every state in the union, you can be sued in ever state in the union, basically.
That court, and all federal courts, should start rejecting all suits from or against companies where neither party's main presence is in this court's jurisdiction.
Unless one of the party's principal business is in the Eastern District, the court should say "have you tried the courts where you and the defendant are principally located first?" and accept only cases where
1) those courts rejected the case for whatever reason and
2) the case would not be rejected if the companies were located in the Eastern District of Texas.
This would allow limited forum shopping in cases where "local" courts dismissed the case out of hand, but would not allow shopping just to get a more favorable jury or judge.
In the alternative, simply dismiss all cases that aren't the principle address of either party. However, that might take an act of Congress.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There is a distinct sense of __non__coincedence__ in the air, the stink of M$ and rotten US corporatism and lack of effective regulation and enforcement of honest transparent business practices.
..."
In spite of what Rob Endele has said this is enemy action, "Once is coincedence
The US legal system, as I have said before, needs to brace up and get its act together on vexatious corporate litigation and to adopt the 'Costs in cause' rule so small defendants with a strong case will always defend. I look to senior academic lawyers, and the appelate benches of the Federal Appeal Circuit and the Supreme Court, which does not require legislation or a specific case but can be delt with by practice direction, to take a lead on this.
Those responsible for business competitiveness, especially in the EU need to do more. At minimum re-opening the M$ anti-trust investigations which I hope TomTom press for, from the Netherands. The State Attorneys and US Justice Department should also re-open the Anti-Trust suit compliance issue, especially after the discovered and proven complicity of M$ in the meritless SCO litigation.
The EU should also raise this as a WTO issue. Indeed the rational reaction is to say to US "We will hold all enforcement and co-operation on IP issues until you have reformed your broken Patent and Copyright systems" and stand firmly against term extension as the rest of the world needs the innovation effect of time limited IP rights. We should no-longer tolerate the East Texas fiasco and put as much back pressure on the US to end this legal corruption, which is, by no-means, too strong a description.
This can be effected by amicus-curia briefs by Commerce and Justice and by making it clear to these judges that all their decisions will be appealed until they resign or retire. They have done enough damage.
And no, after the Economic Crisis largely created by US corporate malfeasance, greed and lack of transperency the rest of the world needs to say 'enough' loudly, and refuse to toady or further pander to the economic nonsense, from the lunatic right, in Washington, which has done so much to damage the world economy.
it's closed source DMCA protected software. There's no way law abiding programmers could see the source code and most of the key developers in these cases have too little time to reverse engineer other people's products.
In short a person "skilled in the art" saw some trade magazine article about a products general function and recreated it without looking... that's pretty much the definition of "general knowledge" as applied to patents.
"exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and a relational system." -- that covers pretty much every OOP sofware that communicates with a database. If it's not a joke, how could such a patent be issued in the first place?
Do you have a single shred of evidence for your claim other than a quote from the summary which intentionally eliminated the following part that shows they are also partners of Borland, Sun and IBM? It's amazing how easily so many people fall for these summaries that manipulate quotes from the article they post about to make it seem like Microsoft is always involved when the only connection between the two is the fact that Software Tree, LLC happens to have the less than unique distinction of being a Microsoft partner (a title that thousands of other corporations have also paid for).