Google Loses Bedrock Suit, All Linux May Infringe

blair1q writes "CNet reports that Google has lost the lawsuit brought by Bedrock, for infringing on Patent 5,893,120, 'Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data,' and has exposed the Linux kernel, in which the infringing code reportedly appears, to liability for patent-license fees. Red Hat also participated in the suit, arguing that the patent was invalid, but the court decided otherwise."

Comments

Patent translation

[sjames]

For a layman's analogy, when rummaging through the fridge for something, they have patented noticing that the mayo is past it's expiration and so throwing it out while you're there. That is all.

Not only is it blindingly obvious to nearly anyone in the field, it's so blindingly obvious that a beginning student is fairly likely to think of it.

Re:Bedrock is patent troll, and the patent is bogu

[Svartalf]

This is a federal case, so it could potentially get appealed all of the way to the Supreme Court (and Google has sufficient funds to do so).

And they will probably go the distance with it in a manner like Bilski was ran- this is the camel's nose in the tent and it's not like it's really valid on several different fronts. (Based on what I'm about to mention, it might be that this is the plan on this...I can't say...)

Besides, there's some very likely prior art. The initial release of NLANR Squid (v. 1.0) was on July of 1996. When it was released, some six months before the Bedrock patent was filed, it was the inheritor of the Harvest HTTP Cache research project's code and resources, which a reduction to practice places it at about a year and a half prior to the Bedrock filing. At it's core, there is the very implementation of what is described in Bedrock's patent as it uses a hash with external chaining and expiry on the fly- it's how the whole thing does fast lookup and aging on the contents in the cache to begin with. It's how it works so "nicely" and what made it special back when it was implemented.