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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.
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.
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.