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Red Hat Settles Patent Case
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
a little birdy in the RHAT legal dept said so (tweet now deleted)
Denny Crane.
Lock and Load.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
"Eastern District of Texas". Need one say more?
I really hope they didn't pay them Giving these weasels money just encourages them. I'd add the traditional "unless the patent really was valid" but I really don't think any software patents are valid.
invent foobar system for non-object non-relational data organization
convert object data to foobar data
convert foobar data to relational data
fire lawyers.
profit
To clear this up before the 'herp derp' begins, let's talk about this court district in East Texas.
My Operating Systems instructor at Rice was called to testify in a Microsoft patent infringement case there as an expert witness. The reason the patent cases are filed there is not because of the 'plaintiff-friendly juries made up of hicks', as everybody loves to think of it. It is because that district is essentially specialized in handling these types of cases, and they happen a lot faster there than they would anywhere else in the Nation. The judges there know patent law very well as so many cases are heard there.
that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
Enough is enough, with their cochamany legal antics and patent trolls.
I want to add a clause to the GPL forbidding use of software in the State of Texas, until they clear this up, and boycott the state -- with all software products, so Texas will not benefit from the software or technology until they clean up their act, and stop allowing 21st-century robbers to loot the treasuries of successful technlogy firms. Who's with me???
How many clear cases of stifled innovation do we need before we have a major overhaul of copyright? Western government is traditionally quite good about their public attitude to corruption. However, if there's one area of corruption that is visible to Joe average and rampant it's IP law. You can't even make a toy model of a real aircraft or car without paying royalties. (As if this is what the manufacturer's first motivation is. What a joke!). Music and film royalties predominately go to middle men and both industries whine on and on about lost profit. Now we have a situation where coming up with a new idea isn't lucrative because you might just step into some obscure patent.It's become a game of which company can sue the other into oblivion. How is that suppose to encourage invention and innovation? Is it any wonder the western world's going backwards in these areas?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Connect this with Red Hat's recent statement to the U.S. Patent Office telling them to stop granting software patents, although the result in the Bilski case gives them no reason to do so.
Red Hat lost. They caved and paid for their own license, and everybody else has to negotiate separately.
It was obvious that if Acacia went after them again, they would not do so in a way that would allow the same outcome as their first case.
The sad thing about this is the way Red Hat has screwed the Open Source developer community. Not with this case, but with their conduct over the past decade. They refused to stick their neck out by lobbying aggressively for an end to software patenting, both in the industry and with government. Then, there was no sentiment in favor of ending software patenting in the industry when the Bilski case came about, and the court followed the BSA's amicus curae statement extensively while paying little attention to the Free Software / Open Source side.
What Red Hat did was court the biggest patent holders extensively for their business. And they got it in part by not rocking the boat on software patenting. So, they made that money on the backs of the community.
And now it's open season on open source. Thanks, guys.
Bruce Perens.
attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source
Thanks, I want to throw up now.
A lot of people seem to be overlooking something. Software Tree Inc is an established company that has been selling products based on their patent for a long time. Software Tree LLC is a subsidiary of Acacia that is handling licensing and enforcement of Software Tree's patent for Software Tree. Sure, Acacia also does patent troll cases (acquiring patents that aren't being used and then suing people), but that's not all they do.
One may argue that there should not be software patents in the first place, but given that they exist, this appears to be a legitimate use of them--a company actively developing and marketing technology based on a patent of its own, going after infringers of that patent using another firm to handle the details of licensing and litigation.
You don't "end" a patent threat by settling. Ever.
If Red Hat were to need someone to provide expert testimony for prior art in interfacing OO systems to relational systems, I developed such a method in SmallTalk and delivered in C++ in the early to mid 90's. This software is currently running the majority of semiconductor fabs world-wide and the technology is owned by Applied Materials - a company that would likely defend themselves vigorously against a suit by these boneheads.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Who do you convince and how do you do it?
That is the question I am trying to ask here.
But did you publish? Either paper or code. It's not prior art if it's a trade secret.
Bruce Perens.
Acacia's patent examiner never looked at the Object View Broker technology from 1994. That in turn was based on an object-oriented semantic modeling tool called Open Books, released by Open Books, Inc, in Cambridge, MA around 1990. That was written in C and released for the OS/2 platform. It wasn't successful in the market because it came out much too early, but it was a brilliant piece of technology that most prospects didn't understand at that time. And Open Books itself was based on the Camps Planning Architecture, a LISP-based technology developed by Mitre Corporation for NASA and DOD in the 1980s. If I remember correctly, it was the basis for some of the early space shuttle mission planning system tools because of the way it could tie together different relational databases.
In what kind of sick system can you get a patent to let 2 open ended systems talk together (No implementation, no specific methods, no specifications, only "We now own the idea that you can use a relational database to store objects"...)
I would like to patent breathing... But after all these patents only apply to software, and not to the physical world... Applying for the joint patent of using 1s and 0s to represent on and offstates of relays instead of using actual relays was also dismissed... But I seem to be just under the level of acceptable patents here... Not much more is required!