Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat's Secret Patent Deal
Bruce Perens writes "When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia's patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat's next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way? Could the outcome have placed Red Hat in violation of the open-source licenses on its own product?"
My Operating Systems instructor (a die hard open source / linux guy) went to testify as an expert at a court case involving patent infringement with some pretty big names involved in this now famous East Texas District court. He was skeptical going out but came back with a different opinion; apparently that court district processes so many IP and software patent claims that the court district that they've become better at dealing with it than any other court. They process the claims faster and the judges are more knowledgeable on the subject than most and run a very tight ship. He said it's easy to see why they might have started those types of cases out there, but the reality now is far different than the picture painted.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
IANAL, however it seems that changing the LGPL to specificly deny sealed cases involving patent infringement settlements with out notification of all developers, to be a prudent response. If there is a settlement involving an LGPL'ed software then all developers need to know so that the infringing code can be change, removed, amended, or licensed.
When dealing with a commercial software house there is only one company that needs to license the code and only one set of developers who are aware of the licensing via the
corporate structure. This paradigm is quite different in the opensource community, this is the equivalent of the company having a ruling/ agreement but being bard from informing the developer staff.
It's being kept a secret because settlement agreements frequently are. Why on earth would a party agree to pay money (implicitly admitting wrongdoing) and NOT demand on a confidentiality clause? And Bruce, the "case" isn't being sealed, simply the terms of the agreement, and while a judge can enter an order prohibiting the parties from discussing the terms it's not typical. Usually the parties reach an agreement on their own and simply file a notice or motion that the case should be dismissed with prejudice. And no offense but I doubt very much that you are facing jail time if you talked about the settlement agreement in that unnamed case you say you can't talk about; that's generally not how things are done.
I have designed and implemented production systems using a direct SQL-field to accessor mapping and direct SQL-to-object mapping as far back as 2000. FFS at least 4 large-ish systems I have written for the last 10 years do that. It is a bleeding obvious approach and it should not be patentable in the first place. Anyone who knows _BOTH_ SQL and OO progamming and is using a dynamic language where you can generate database structures more or less on the fly like Perl would come up to this as an approach sooner or later.
In fact I can think of a prior art here off the top of my head. RT uses at least some of these paradigms and some of its code dates back to 1996. Someone needs to ask Jesse when did he start using the automated mapping, but I suspect it is before the Acacia patent filing date.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Quite right. The patent claims to own the concept of representing a database record with a class instance (object instance). The more interesting question is why Red Hat didn't challenge this patent based on originality or obviousness: I personally have prior art going back to the mid-90s, and I'm pretty sure that others right here on this site do as well; some may have prior art going back further.
My blog
Found it:
“Once Red Hat settles and pays for a license for the patent, any subsequent defendant will find it more difficult to convince a court that the patent should not be enforceable.”
In the limit as "more difficult" goes to "not".
Since the case is sealed, subsequent courts will never know exactly what Red Hat copped to, or why. It could be anything, from a total capitulation on the merits to a conflict of the trial date with a lawyer's daughter's wedding. Neither is likely, but neither is impossible, and the unknowability moots this as a precedent. In any subsequent case, plaintiff (Acacia) will have to agree with the defendants (h4xx0rz X, Y, and Z) to stipulate that the Red Hat case can have no bearing, unless Acacia wants to violate the order and tell the judge why it should have bearing.
And even if the settlement was unsealed, settlement precludes the case from being a precedent, so all Acacia could do, if anything, is repeat facts from it, not state that it is a legal validation of their patent.
I agree. Secret agreements shouldn't be allowed ever. The only legitimate reason an agreement must be kept secret is to cover illegal activity, and that's stretching the meaning of legitimate, isn't it? For any contract to be enforceable (perhaps over some dollar amount or people involved?) it should have to be filed and on record, for anyone to find with a simple search. I say this a programmer who mostly works under contract with publicly held corporations. Maybe contracts under $10000 in value, or between 2 individuals (as long as neither is acting on behalf of another person, group, or corporation) could be exempt I suppose. Note I'm not saying the government should be approving these, just keeping them on file as proof they exist, and what the agreed upon terms were. This would have a few drawbacks, but also many benefits, especially when something fishy is attempted (dealt with that!) and I think it would outweigh the overall benefits of the current system.
The only legitimate reason an agreement must be kept secret is to cover illegal activity
No it isn't. It allows parties to negotiate a deal which is more favorable to one of them than the other usually gives to most people, without causing everyone who the second party negotiates with in the future to demand the same deal.
If we were talking about a business deal, this would be fine. Citizens have no right to a fair price. However, when we're talking about a "deal" to settle a lawsuit, it's a whole different game. Secret legal settlements are anathema to the basic principal of equal treatment before the law -- since the main purpose of secret settlements seems to be covering up gross inequalities in application of the law.
It does if the person writing the article knows how to write. Indeed, a summary of the article is exactly what the first paragraph in a properly written article is supposed to be. The rest of the article should elaborate on the ideas, concepts, and assertions made in the first paragraph. This is basic article writing 101.
Perhaps that's how they make you write your book reports in middle school, but plenty of newspapers, magazines, etc. use the pyramid lead, the feature-style lead, etc. The inverted pyramid lead (which you are somewhat describing) is not Holy Writ From The God of Journalism.
Advice: on VPS providers
The most likely reason they settled is because the law was clear and both parties knew what would happen if they went to trial.
Probably true. That they settled, is not the issue. The secrecy of the settlement is.
The most likely reason they did not release the details is that releasing the details hinders the parties ability to bilk 3rd parties.
FTFY.
The most likely reason everyone else gets upset about this is because they are the 3rd party and want whatever advantage the 2 settling parties are holding by keeping it secret.
People are upset, because whatever benefit the parties may hold, comes at the cost of making the law more opaque and uneven in its application. The legal system is a public disgrace, and a millstone around the neck of the economy, when it conducts its business in secret in order to secure the private benefit of a lucky few.
Its possible only one party benefits directly from the secret, but in that case they certainly paid the other party in the settlement agreement or it would not be secret.
Yup, most likely someone somewhere got paid off.