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Red Hat Patenting Around Open Standards

Posted by Soulskill on from the tread-lightly dept.

I Believe in Unicorns writes "Red Hat's patent policy says 'In an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to... develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. We do so reluctantly...' Meanwhile, USPTO Application #: 20090063418, 'Method and an apparatus to deliver messages between applications,' claims a patent on routing messages using an XQuery match, which is an extension of the 'unencumbered' AMQP protocol that Red Hat is helping to make. Is this a defensive patent, or is Red Hat cynically staking out a software patent claim to an obvious extension of AMQP? Is Red Hat's promise to 'refrain from enforcing the infringed patent' against open source a reliable contract, or a trap for the unwary? Given the Microsoft-Red Hat deal in February, are we seeing Red Hat's 'Novell Moment?'" Reader Defeat_Globalism contributes a related story about an international research team who conducted experiments to "quantify the ways patent systems and market forces might influence someone to invent and solve intellectual problems." Their conclusion was that a system which doesn't restrict prizes to the winner provides more motivation for innovation.

3 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Defensive Patents by dirvine · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why not simply publish the spec in wikipedia and as many lists as possible (including your own web site). Prior art == defense in patent land, or at least it is supposed to.

    This would appear to be a 'wolf in sheeps clothing' situation and a very dangerous one. A good idea for anti-patent people (and I have a few of these things and don't like them) is for the eff or somebody to create a easily search-able list of 'good ideas' top protect the ideas from being patented.

    To stop commercial exploitation of an idea (like sticking the idea into an operating system thats very popular) thereby effectively banning all other operating systems or companies competing, is a completely different matter, and this is where defensive patents would help, but then you have to decide who can use the tech - and were back at square 1 again - very few people have the mental capacity to decide on this point.

  2. Re:Defensive Patents by icebike · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > That's the key behind defensive patents. Other companies won't want to sue you for patent infringement, because they know that you can respond in kind.

    That works till RedHat falls into the wrong hands. If it goes titsup in a bad economy and the receivers sell off its assets to the patent trolls all bets are off.

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  3. GPL a pretty good shield. by FlyingBishop · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If Red Hat should ever go after FOSS, their extensive contributions to GPL projects should prevent them from doing anything malicious with these patents.

    Though I would worry for those with more permissive licenses, the second that Red Hat contributes a line of code related to this patent to a FOSS project, that should be sufficient to argue that Red Hat placed the patent out for similar free use. I'd say this is more a question of preventing patent trolls from patenting something mind-numbingly obvious.

    Of course, placing the patents under a GPL restriction would allow them to enforce the patents against proprietary use. That would be quite a turn.