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Xerox Sues Google, Yahoo Over Search Patents
gnosygnus writes "Xerox Corp has sued Google, Inc. and Yahoo, Inc., accusing them of infringing the document management company's patents related to Internet search. In a lawsuit filed last Friday in the US District Court in Delaware, Xerox said Google's Web-based services, such as Google Maps, YouTube and AdSense advertising software, as well as Web tools including Yahoo Shopping, infringe patents granted as far back as 2001. Xerox seeks compensation for past infringement and asked the court to halt the companies from further using the technology."
that Google and Yahoo COPIED Xerox???
Anyone have a link to this patent? The summary fails to accurately describe what it is they patented - though the impression I get is... Practically Everything?
... ditto ...
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
My guess is that Xerox isn't looking for any big payout, but rather some kind of cross-licensing deal for patents.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
"We want your cake too. And it'll cost us less in legal fees than the potential benefit. That's a mighty nice website you have there. It would be a shame if anything were to...happen... to it. Probable result: cross-licensing agreement to patent portfolio to lock out smaller competitors, higher costs for consumers in countries with strong IP laws. "
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Patent law is retarded. You can sit on a patent for 19 years and 11 months. There is no requirement to go after people to keep a patent enforcible. You can patent something and wait for the entire term of the patent for someone to actually invent/commercialize what you have patented, and then sue them at the 11th hour and take as much money from them as the courts will give you.
The exclusion of microsoft is interesting, perhaps MS already has a cross licensing deal with Xerox?
Dear Google, Yahoo, and anyone else who has more money than I do. I would like some of your money. Please give me some money or I will have to sue you for it. Thank you and have a nice day.
mmmm...forbidden donut
I recognize their historical importance in IT, but the past is past. Whoever is calling their shots now is acting like a patent troll. This isn't the first time, either.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
I agree, but not because they are suing for patent violation. I agree, because they waited almost 10 years to enforce this patent. Why the wait? Presumably these companies were in violation for longer than just the past year or 2. And it's not like they can say that they "just found out that they existed"...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
They probably tried to actually find something using Bing and decided they wouldn't have a case.
Good times, but how the mighty have fallen these days. I for one miss the idea of a pure research group.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
They filed in Delaware? Don't they know all suits like this seem to be required to be filed in East Texas!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
And once upon a time SCO was a respectable Unix vendor.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You can sit on a patent for 19 years and 11 months. There is no requirement to go after people to keep a patent enforcible.
Citation needed. Where I come from, they have something called equitable estoppel. In this case, you're looking for laches.
Xerox is notable for failing to commercialise or profit from PARC's accomplishments, including the invention of the gui, laser printing, bit-mapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet. It is the most monumental example of dropping the ball that I can think of.
I can: PATENT TROLL.
I know it's in vogue here on Slashdot to scream "Troll!" anytime a patent holder sues for infringement, but "patent troll" really means something distinct from "patent suit."
From the Wiki, a patent troll is someone who:
* Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent;
* Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service;
* Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base
* Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights.
* Asserts patent infringement claims against non-copiers or against a large industry that is composed of non-copiers
TFA and TFS are thin on details, so there is no evidence to support the idea that Xerox is doing any one of these.
Both patents I've seen cited as applicable were granted (filed in 2001) in 2004.
Given that they're just suing now, unless there's been extensive negotiation privately that's somehow managed to not leak out at all over 5-6 years (unlikely), Xerox probably won't be able to get any court to enforce shit. It's called laches - you have to actually work to minimize your damages. If you knowingly let infringers make use of your IP so you can sue them when they're worth something, you lose the ability to enforce your patent.
after discovery of infringement (maybe a couple years after the event), they could have attempted to come to an agreement with both entities. Negotiation might have broken down and now the patent holder's last recourse is an infringement suit.
Wouldn't be the first time that series of events occurred, especially when multiple patent-lawyer-loaded parties are involved, and it would create a legitimate delay before filing suit.
Be interesting to see what the details actually were, however.
No, they screwed themselves. They built a machine that was far too expensive for the marketplace, and there was such poor leadership at Xerox, so the Star just didn't take.
And it wasn't just Microsoft (or, more correctly, Apple) that benefited from Xerox PARC. The following technologies all were originally developed at PARC and their inventors went on to start their own businesses or work for other companies:
- Ethernet: Bob Metcalfe went off to start 3COM
- WYSIWYG word processing: Butler Lampson went off to work at DEC (He now works at Microsoft)
- GUI: Most of the GUI programmers went to work at Apple.
- Laser printers: The Laser printer guys went to work at Apple
- PostScript: John Warnock took his invention with him he founded Adobe Systems (it's no surprise that Apple's LaserWriter was the first printer to use PostScript)
and the list goes on. Today's corporate office PC network basically owes its existence to Xerox PARC and the Xerox Star.
My blog
Actually, no, you can't sit on it and expect to be able to enforce it like you imply.
You don't lose the patent like you do with Trademark- but if you delay, the range of things that ends up happening goes from no damages to an inability to enforce against the infringers that you didn't enforce against during the time you "sat on it". Subsequent infringers can be enforced against during the life of the patent- but not the others if you delay any substantive time on it from the moment that the infringement becomes obvious to you or should have been so.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'm not cutting them any slack. Roughly 7+ years to determine if they're infringing and not enforcing their rights is a bit beyond the pale and is very probably subject to equitable estoppel out of the gate. They very probably shouldn't have ran this one up the flagpole in the first place- and it's very, very patent-trolly. Patent trolls do not get an out no matter what their past contributions might have been.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
any and all podcast grabbers, twitter, flicker, friendster, eharmony... let's see... what other social/popular sites do people keep tell me to join.... There needs to be a law where if you are going to sue for tech patent infringement, you need to sue all the companies that have infringed at once or none at all.
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
If there's a better definition of a troll, I don't know what it is...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
...They practically invented the GUI.
...and if they'd be able to patent it, we'd still all be running DOS, since Xerox never came out with a GUI product. Such is the power of software patents to drive innovation (into the ground).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
"Will the world end in fire or ice?"
Neither, Bobby; it's gonna be lawsuits.
Except patent trolls file in east Texas, not Delaware. Most patent trolls create a shell office in Texas just so they can file cases there - in fact, I believe setting up shell offices was Texas' biggest growth industries during the recession.
Bear with me..
The problems with patents as they currently stand is they are often used as bullshit tools whihc stifle technology in an attempt to extort or monopolise any technology or idea. What once might have been a useful tool has become a strategic game-piece often crippling American innovation when it was intended to encourage it.
But I don't believe the answer is to abolish the system, or even to make it increasingly difficult to make use of, that would punish legitimate users and patent trolls and legal firms would no doubt find ways to continue around it.
What I'd like to see is it remain almost exactly as it is today, with a few small changes:
It's probably worth noting that software companies which wish to keep their code and related processes black-boxed would still have several options, one obvious option (aside from restrictive licensing and binary only releases) being SAS, where they control the process by keeping access to all relevant code and business systems themselves, only pushing relevant/needed data out to the client front-end. SAS is really the ultimate black-box solution and it protect your property from just about everything but internal abuse (staff, break-ins, social engineering) and network related penetration. And that's nothing new.
Sorry about any grammaros/typos/spellos. I just wanted to get these ideas out while there was still active discussion. Over the past several years I've begun to strongly believe our own enemy (patents - via trolling/hording and other related anti-competitive business practices) are actually our best hope for a sensible business/technology future.
Quack, quack.
Patent it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Now I'm going to have to sue Xerox for violating my patent for the business process of how to make money from companies using ridiculous patent infringement lawsuits.
Xerox has done a lot of innovating. They have also quite famously totally failed to properly DO anything with the things they've created. We could have had something akin to Java a lot earlier in the form of Smalltalk-80. Xerox in their "wisdom" decided to charge a king's ransom for it forever enshrining it in it's ivory tower. It took Apple, Microsoft and Amiga, Inc to bring the windowed interface to the world, despite Xerox having the working system right in front of them (again, in the form of Smalltalk-80).
So Xerox missed the boat...nay, the entire 20 year revolution of home computers and business computing without so much as a "duh?" Guess there's not much left to do but become the next great patent troll, now that SCO is out of the picture. See Bing in that lawsuit anywhere? Of course not...look not behind the curtain, mortal.
You are right, how could I forget. I really love Smalltalk the language, but I'm less keen on the whole "modify the image" thing. I'm sure it would have been a lot more successful if it were file-based.
Well, no - since the GUI would have been patented in the 1970s and at that time the law gave protection for 17 years from the date of publication (and usually took 3 years to get published - current law is 20 years from filing). GUIs didn't really become popular until the late 1980s and that would have been near the end of any patent for it, so it may have delayed the GUI, but not killed it. Some hardware patents Xerox showed off such as the mouse would have already been near end of patent by the 1980s (invented in the 1960s).
I'm not saying software patents don't suck - I don't think people should be able to patent, say, how to do the Navier Stokes equations for fluid dynamics in software and on graphics hardware, which has been done multiple times (and the methods are trivially obvious in some cases - one hardware accelerated patent I saw was essentially implementing an expired software patent in hardware). OTOH, if you INVENTED the Navier Stokes equations, then sure - allow a patent that can apply to software. I also don't think an idea itself should be patentable, either - for instance, I remember Woz talking about when he made characters display on a screen and then later getting sued by a TV manufacturer that had patented the idea - there needs to be some practical plan to implement it.
I get your point, but need to mention that Xerox has been selling laser printers for many, many years. The book Dealers of Lightning claims that their profits from laser printing have easily paid for all of the research done by PARC.
Also, Xerox did not invent the mouse, and has never claimed to have done so.
I would suggest looking into the Ingres/Postgres historical code for prior art - or for that many, any of the pre-1991 database engines. If I remember correctly (from circa 5 years ago - the last time I looked at it) - the postgres code prior to the 1995 adoption by the PostgreSQL group had functionality in it under the first patent and was built during it's period before it became abandonware. I seem to remember similar functionality for text searches in DBase III, but I could be poorly remembering.
As for the second - as the link is not valid - I would examine LISP designs for prior art circa 1956. Other environments since have also had "Method and apparatus for the integration of information and knowledge" - but LISP is one of the original to have this as an architectural component. I believe the 1945 paper used as a prototype for some of LISP design also had this, but I've misplaced the reference. (it's on one of the many, many fine lisp websites *grin*)
Without more definition than a title, any expert system would qualify and much of all the historical research into Artificial Intelligence.
*thinking* - expert systems may also hold prior art against the first patent as well.
IANAL,and I'm rusty as all anything- but I hope it helps someone.
No, object oriented programming was invented in 1967 in Norway. The language was Simula 67. What Xerox came up with was the application of OO to graphical programming.
Actually, Apple stole the tech from Xerox, then licensed the tech to HP and Microsoft.
Xerox sued, but this was way back when. I don't think there was even a concept of a software patent when the Star system was developed. They originally tried to sue for copyright infringement, but the timing of the suit caused problems. They then tried to sue for unfair business practices. IIRC, they eventually settled out of court.
You're wrong. Xerox was given the opportunity to invest $1 Million into Apple at pre-IPO status. Upon vesting it was worth approximately $125 Million to Xerox. They pocketed it immediately.
Xerox corporate had no interest until after they saw the runaway success of Apple to try and then enforce patents already shown amicably to Apple. Apple hired 15 engineers away from Xerox who were the key creators of much of that work. The brain drain at Xerox PARC was their own fault was half their fault and half the fault of the engineers. The fact they let a bunch of Ph.Ds experiment and get paid while producing no loyalty to Xerox speaks volumes about PARC and the pricks who exploited this once in a life time opportunity. None of these engineers have an ounce of ethics in their bones. They all saw green, took the money and ran with it. We got 3Com, Adobe, more tech from Apple and much more. The engineers turned out to be the real thieves.
There is a reason you sign NDAs today--there is always a precedence.