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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."
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*
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.
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.