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OSI Refers Novell Patent Deal To Authorities
WebMink writes "Worried that the unholy alliance of Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC — hardly known for their collaboration — is establishing a patent troll called CPTN to attack open source software, the Open Source Initiative has announced that they have referred the Novell deal over to the German competition authorities."
Give them crap in all of Europe? Note that the world is rather larger than the USA...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Are you implying some other countries court could do more?
File it in US and watch it unfurl in a torrent of doldrums in a matter of decades!
Or perhaps they just saw that they may be breaking German law in particular, I dunno...
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"...is establishing a patent troll called CPTN to attack open source software..."
As they say in the fact verification industry, [citation needed].
... and then they built the supercollider.
IANAL, but seeing as how the CPTN combines the patent portfolios four of the largest and most litigious technology firms and appears to exist to exclude certain competition from the market by using intellectual property, couldn't they be charged with a Section 1 violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for operating as a cartel?
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Is the poster arguing we should eliminate the patent system?
I don't know about original poster, but my argument would be on the line of eliminating patents for software. Copyright and trade-secret should be more than enough for software (even disregrading what the trademark can do: see the faec... errr.. pardon me... facebook I meant)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That's adorably naive.
In America, the Sherman Antitrust Act is a legal artifact, like "Common Law" and sodomy legislation. While technically still legal precedent, ever since the second revolutionary war(the invisible one) America has all but stopped enforcing such barbaric refuges of bigotry(anti-corporate discrimination).
I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.
I, for one, do not welcome them. And I think you might not either if you have your wish -- your comment is adorably naive. These corporate overlords do not care about personal loss or gain. They do not care about the environment. They do not care about humanity. They do not care about learning nor innovation. They do not care about you. The only thing they care about is their bottom line, extracting fortune and knowledge from the "commoners", stifling innovation, controlling what you think, and controlling how and where you spend your money. I, for one, eagerly anticipate the downfall of the United States of America not because I hate the people but because the people no long have freedom -- you have given it away to a government that is controlled by your corporate overlords and no longer cares about the people. Fortunately the economy of the USA seems to be supporting freedom indirectly by slowly and agonisingly collapsing. Keep your corporate overlords.
Poe's Law for the win.
My Sysadmin Blog
SUSE is not a company anymore. It is a trademark.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
IBM (yes they are a big patent troll) and Google have a large vested interest in open source software.
I can only imagine the deal with Sun and Oracle has already made IBM very nervous. It would bug me if I worked for them.
The second they start suing and filing injunctions to force us to buy their products you can bet they will fight back. Not to mention Mark Shuttleworth has invested hundreds of millions in Ubuntu and other products which would be killed by such an onslaught. He would probably contribute to such a cause and fight as well. It would be a legal war equivalent to World War I to say the least in the industry.
It would be very ineffective for the big boys to wage. Sure they would convince many fortunate 500 companies for an anti-gnu clauses but many would fight back. The extra revenue for those who are fall to the sight of lawyers will be much smaller than the legal costs to fight IBM, Google, Redhat, Rackspace, and whoever else all combined.
http://saveie6.com/
The concept of sarcasm is lost on you, isn't it?
You also might want to Google for phrases of the form "I for one welcome our new ___ overlords." That would be a start.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Drag the entire EU with it? If you're going to try to get a government to investigate this stuff, the German government is probably the best place to start. One, because US courts, even if they could, aren't going to do shit. Two, because Germany, besides being an important and relatively large country in its own right, really is the big dog in the EU.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Now that should have been the plot of the new Tron.
The concept of sarcasm is lost on you, isn't it?
You also might want to Google for phrases of the form "I for one welcome our new ___ overlords." That would be a start.
I've spent the last hour googling "I for one welcome our new ___ overlords" and can say with conviction that the most disturbing are the tentacle photos.
What can the German court do?
It seems that the company that Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle formed to buy these patents is registered in Germany.
IANAL, but seeing as how the CPTN combines the patent portfolios four of the largest and most litigious technology firms and appears to exist to exclude certain competition from the market by using intellectual property, couldn't they be charged with a Section 1 violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for operating as a cartel?
They can't, because apparently CPTN is a German company. Your idea that this company was set up to hurt Google is at this point pure supposition. At this time it is just as likely that we have here four companies who thought it would be cheaper to pay $450 million for a lot of patents, just $112.5 million each, rather than letting them fall into the hands of a patent troll who immediately runs to their favourite court in texas.
Since Novell was a company that was actually doing business, there is a good chance that say EMC's developers figured out long ago that EMC is infringing on a few of Novell's patents, while Novell is also infringing on a few of EMC's patent, so they had talks on some higher level and decided that between EMC and Novell, the cheapest way to proceed would be to just ignore this infringement. But whatever patent troll would buy the patents would _not_ be infringing on anyone else's patents because patent trolls don't produce anything, so EMC would now have to make sure these patents cannot be used against them. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft might be in the same boat.