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.'"

Comments

It's obvious how this was settled...

[Fluffeh]

Denny Crane.

Lock and Load.

Re:Let's talk about...

[Bruce Perens]

But given that the case settled, there's little chance those judges had much to do with it. Also, the reputation is that the court is extremely plaintiff-favorable - so it would not simply be that the judges are well versed in patent law. The implication is prejudice.

I've HAD it with East Texas

[mysidia]

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???

Re:I've HAD it with East Texas

[Grond]

The Eastern District of Texas is not the most patentee-favorable district in the country. Recent research by Mark Lemley found that it had the 6th highest patentee win rate of districts with a significant number of patent infringement cases. The Northern District of Texas, Middle District of Florida, District of Nevada, District of Delaware, and District of Oregon are all more favorable to the patentee.

The Texas Eastern patentee win rate was 40.3%, compared to a high of 55.1% in Texas Northern. The lowest rate was Georgia Northern at 11.5%. There's a wide range in win rates, and the rates are affected by a lot of factors.

Furthermore, blaming the Eastern District of Texas is a tremendous case of confusing correlation with causation. Litigants select Texas Eastern for a lot of reasons. For example, it's a fairly fast docket (though not the fastest), and the judges are experienced and have a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Further, while the Federal Circuit controls patent law, there are lots of other issues that are based on 5th Circuit law, which may be attractive for various reasons.

Re:I've HAD it with East Texas

[arth1]

The Eastern District of Texas is not the most patentee-favorable district in the country. Recent research by Mark Lemley found that it had the 6th highest patentee win rate of districts with a significant number of patent infringement cases. The Northern District of Texas, Middle District of Florida, District of Nevada, District of Delaware, and District of Oregon are all more favorable to the patentee.

That fails to take into account the selection bias. The filers aren't random, but get to select where to go, so the statistics are comparing apples to oranges.

Easter Texas attracts trolls, many of which will fail. The failure rate is higher in Eastern Texas than in, say, Oregon, because the failure risk for each individual case is lower, which attracts more trolls, many of which will fail.

Or, to put it another way, if you know you'll win the case no matter what court you go to, you don't gain anything by going to Eastern Texas. If you're unsure, and want to maximize your chances, you do. That doesn't make it a certainty that you'll win in Eastern Texas, just more likely than if filing elsewhere. Take the same case to, say, Oregon, and the risk of losing that case is lower, despite the overall statistics is higher there. Cause the Oregon statistics isn't for patent trolls, but people who feel confident enough that they'll win even in Oregon because they actually have a case.

How many clear cases of stifled innovation?

[syousef]

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?

Re:Red Hat Lost. You did too.

[hweimer]

Red Hat lost. They caved and paid for their own license, and everybody else has to negotiate separately.

Are you sure about that? JBoss is LGPL2.1, which contains a "liberty-or-death" clause regarding software patents. If someone got sued over distributing JBoss because of this patent, they could trivially go after Red Hat. I somehow doubt that this is the case here.

Re:Red Hat Lost. You did too.

[Bruce Perens]

Red Hat, as the copyright holder, is not held to the license terms regarding their own software. If they are not the copyright holder of a substantial part of jBoss, another copyright holder could sue them.

One would think that a feature of a commercial jBoss license is indemnification. Users under the Open Source license are on their own.

Re:Red Hat Lost. You did too.

[int69h]

Why exactly should Red Hat be the ones forced to stick their neck out? It would be nice if they did, but they are under no obligation to do so and haven't "screwed" anyone. Perhaps you've forgotten that Red Hat is a huge contributor to the community in the form of code, unlike certain other popular distributions. They made their money on the backs of their employees.

Re:Red Hat Lost. You did too.

[int69h]

For the sake of comparison, here's some other companies making money off the Linux kernel that could easily fund the lobbying and publicity efforts: Google 1.2%, Nokia 2.5%, IBM 2.9%, and many others whose contributions were too small to measure, although I'm pretty sure it will be a cold day in hell before IBM lobbies to abolish software patents.

http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/

Prior art not considered

[woboyle]

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.