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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."
We dont have software patents in the real world.
Apparently the company is owned by an East Texas lawyer, and does not do anything except file patent lawsuits against everybody.
Patent Litigation Weekly: PubPat and "Patent Troll" Make Strange Bedfellows
Meanwhile, it's not unusual that a patent-enforcement company recently set up in East Texas would file suit there this week against ten Internet-based and software companies. Nor is it unusual that Texas corporate records show the company is owned by an erstwhile big-firm lawyer, in this case David Garrod, formerly of Goodwin Procter.
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2009/06/pubpat-and-patent-troll-make-strange-bedfellows.html
Here is a sad, 2009 slashdot article about the company.
Patent Trolls Target Small East Texas Companies
> Posted by kdawson on Friday July 24 2009, @09:14AM
> from the patently-absurd dept.
> An anonymous reader writes "In a sign that patent trolls are getting desperate to keep their cases in East Texas — long known as the friendliest venue for their claims — some have taken to suing tiny, no-name companies that are run by East Texas residents. The hope is that, if at least one defendant is located in East Texas, the judge will keep the entire case there. Nate Neel, a Longview, Texas resident with a small open source software company called CitiWare, was sued by Bedrock Computer Technologies in June despite (he claims) having no customers or other meaningful operations of any kind. In response, Mr. Neel has posted a strongly worded letter to Bedrock's attorneys on his Web site. It will be interesting to see how East Texas judges respond to this abuse of process perpetrated against their own residents."
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=bedrock
BTW: the F/OSS company, CitiWare, is no longer in business. Sued of existence?
Although I don't trust Florian Mueller any further than I can spit, I think it may be informative to read his blog post on the subject. Florian does provide court records, and good description of the patent in question.
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/04/texas-jury-finds-against-google-in.html
If companies like Microsoft, and Apple, are successful, then yes.
Nowadays I don't believe that MS is the enemy.
Apple has much to lose from the advancement of Linux with Google's Droid OS.
This one has *got* to find itself appealed, and that appeal will happen well outside of East Texas.
I for one do not see folks like IBM, RH, Intel, Oracle, or other huge companies simply forking over either, even if the "licensing fee" was something ridiculously low. IT would be the camel's nose in the tent, and they know it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How can you have a friendly venue for a particular sort of legal case? Isn't there any sort of oversight which deals with what is an obvious sign of partiality? I can see a jury being biased in some way by being picked from, say, a very religious area... but why have judges at all if they're even less likely to impartially apply the law?
Bet you a nickel the iOS kernel infringes in much the same way.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How much does immigration to the real world cost? Can the real world absorb 300 million refugees from the United States patent regime?
Everyone wants to play in the smartphone market. MS is already touting Windows 8 on ARM. And can't even get a foot into the tablet market, because of the Apple and Android players. If Android can't be easily untethered from licensing issues, it will open a big hole for Ballmer & Co. on every front of the future of personal computing.
If only Florian didn't spin everything to his own personal vendetta... I might actually read his articles.
But he ducks and weaves and picks out all the wrong facts to focus on... And gets it entirely wrong.
As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003 .
So, there's really nothing prior to that which offends the patent? Given the generic elevator/tree description of the patent, i find it very hard to believe.
I also note that they don't call out what code actually offends, so there's no way to track down when it specifically came into being -
but of course, that's useful when you don't want to call attention to the fact that the code has been in place longer than the patent has been around....
The good ol' software patent, a method and apparatus for extortion and not much else.
I assume that "east district of texas" has somewhere around 10x the usual judges and a very large, busy courthouse and is somehow or other making a great deal of money off all this litigation.
It's a bit like red-light-cameras. Nobody likes them. They aren't serving their publicly declared purpose. But the local government won't give up their cash cow easily. So ya, they're fine with it I'd imagine. Don't expect Texas to do anything about it. But problem is, federal laws regarding jurisdiction allow them to keep doing this. There's federal laws that need to be changed to stope this abuse. There's no point in giving Texas the evil eye, they're just playing the system by the rules and are very happy to see it continue.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It wouldn't surprise me if TPTB squash Bedrock like a bug.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Is it just me, or does this patent describe a hashtable?
Look on the bright side... Hopefully this will finally get the big companies to realize the current absurdity in the patent system, and push their paid for politicians to reform the system. Their practice of building a war chests of patents does little when you have a someone like this who (like wall street and finance in general) builds nothing and has no productive business function.
Cancel that retirement party
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data.
information storage and retrieval - nothing new here.
using a hashing technique - nothing new here
with external chaining - using what?
and on-the-fly removal of expired data - "on-the-fly" is a nice buzzword, but this is also nothing new.
So apparently we can just mix and match random old techniques, and call it innovation and get it patented?
Which portion of the linux kernal supposedly infringes? Does prior ary mean anything here?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Combining a chained hash table with a priority queue was obvious 40 years ago. How can something like this be patented? It seems it is time for severe penalties for trying to patent obvious things. Like a few years in prison. These people do way more damage than terrorists ever did.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The original Linux kernel came almost ten years before the patent was filed. Good luck finding when it started "infringing" on the patent. Also, almost every serious CS major has probably infringed on this stupid patent.
Like if it refuses to index sites in East Texas would the other businesses there sit up and clean up the mess there?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
it describes a specific implementation of a hashtable (linked list for collision resolution, as opposed to e.g. moving the colliding item into the next bucket) with some extra features (automatic removal of 'expired' items during other operations). I still would not be at all surprised to find prior art.
It's just you. The patent is on garbage collecting a hashtable/linked list combination while it is in use.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
They sure seem like it.
It's just you. The patent is on garbage collecting a hashtable/linked list combination while it is in use.
That sounds so immensely innovative that I'm not at all surprised that a patent was granted for it.
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.
I won't comment on the validity, it seems pretty obvious to combine techniques for accessing/modifying a hashed/linked list with combing a list for items to delete, but there's a trivial work-around for it. Don't delete items as you comb through them, simply mark them as invalid and put them on a list of records to be recovered. Periodically, or when running low on storage, delete items on the to-be-deleted list. Might even be faster when multi-threaded if the invalidate can be done with a lightweight synchronization rather than locking the record(s) out while recycling them; can even keep a private list of invalidated records, then add that to a global list to be recycled. Claims 2, 4, 6, 8 are ridiculous on the face of it, though - using dynamic limits for ANYTHING is not novel unless you can show a significant problem that hasn't been solved before. Simply specifying a dynamic value that a routine uses to count the number of iterations of a process, length of time to spend doing something, number of things to do in a pass, etc, is 40 years old at least.
It's not that novel. I'm pretty sure that in in the 20 years that I have been doing software I have done this same thing 3 times at 3 different companies that all pre-date the patent application. It's just the obvious solution for some types of problems. It's to bad that most of us just solve problems and work, because if any one of us had written a little magazine article about this there would be obvious prior art!!
I assume this is tongue and cheek, but the Eastern District of Texas (in its entirety) has 10 Federal judges and 10 magistrate judges. In Marshall Texas, where a majority of the "trolls" file, there are three judges. (http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/page1.shtml?location=info)
Notwithstanding the sometimes (frequently?) wacky jury results, an interesting thing is starting to happen though with the Eastern District of Texas: the judges are getting very good at patent cases. The judges are very good at doing "claim construction" and other technical aspects of patent cases. The result is cases tend not to languish because the judge is confused or baffled by the process or technology.
By contrast, there are districts that it is virtually impossible to litigate patent infringement cases because there is NO expertise among the judges.
Time to file my patent for "an array for storing values populated by user input" .
Guess you are going to have to move to Europe.
A patent like this when validated takes everyone down. Linux, BSD and other open codebases are significantly more visible to these trolls, so they draw fire first - but something as vague as this hits everyone.
Apple has a significant investment in open code that would likely be found in violation of this patent, so why on earth would they try to destroy it? So does Microsoft. And IBM, Oracle and many, many other companies with very deep pockets. This is, effectively, mutually assured destruction for them.
The only type of person who stands to benefit is a patent troll firing off pot shots from a safe distance. Hey! What do you know!
Culture is more than commerce
This could be a great software patent showdown. I'm always hoping. I want to see federal circuit court address the software patent issue squarely. The earlier poster was right about Groklaw.
It's not a patent for doing that, it's a patent for a way of doing that.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's already a patch for it.
The darwin kernel source code is available.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You know what this technology would be well suited to? Garbage collecting software patents from USPTO.
I mean I'm sorry USPTO. You do not have the right to tell me I'm not allowed to think up an (THE) obvious
solution to an obvious and easily specifiable algorithmic or data structure issue.
This is basic second year computer science undergrad basics, at best.
This is complete crap.
If I were Google UI would vest all my software technology rights in a small branch company in Barbados and be done with it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you think patent law is unsettling, wait until you see Probate law.
Kill everyone who owns something, and it becomes property of their relatives, or their creditors, or the state, based on a table of primacy that would make your average FPU blow chunks.
Google should just buy Hanna-Barbara and get the rights to Bedrock (and Fred and Wilma and Barney etc. The would also have the patents for Fire, the Wheel and using Dinosaurs as tools...
Wow. My copy of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen has the first half of that. And the second, surely that falls under the realm of obvious ways to improve an algorithm.
actuallly, the USPTA is allowed to tell you what you can think up. As the number of thinking people increases, the absurdity of this proposition becomes evident. C'est la vie.
Well they certainly did an outstanding job in this case. I always have, and always will, completely ignore all USPTO software patents,
except to assess their value as the butt of jokes and ridicule.
( I live in the real world, not the innovation-crushing US of A).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Patent suits are are only decided by Jury at the first stage. This one gets automatically appealed. Just like all the other ones.
I wouldn't get too worked up about this.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"The Ministry has fallen. The Minister of Magic is Dead. They are Coming."
It would be awfully convenient if the value of pi is 3, instead of that stupid never ending decimal 3.141592654... So hope they will change it too. May be with retrospective effect so that I could go back to my grade school and have my math grade changed. "Mrs McGuillacady, the answer you marked wrong is correct now. So you owe me a passing grade".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The UniVerse database as well as Prime Information were using this type of structure since the late 1980s. UniVerse has a "Dynamic" file that uses hashing to store data with an extended structure to store data that does not fit in the primary block.
Furthermore, when additional space is required, a block restructure is performed, (the database compresses the blocks before requesting additional space i.e. garbage collect).
I'm certain this will get quashed in appeal when a real court hears it. :) (East Texas is really just Western Arkansas, only with more teeth, but the same amount of sister-love......)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
No. It looks like it describes something utterly obvious done to a hash table, though.
Let's say you have a hash table, where you resolve hash collisions by having a linked list of everything that shares that hash value. Whenever you traverse that linked list, whether you're adding another entry, or searching for one of the items on that list, or whatever, since you have to traverse the list anyway, you could examine each entry on the list and possibly throw it away if it's something that you think you'll never use. Like, say, if it's an expired cache entry.
If I'm reading this patent right, that idea patented.
Seriously. And that's outrageous. If stuff this obvious is patentable, then programmers simply have no chance at all. You would have to hire a lawyer to work a week for every hour that a programmer works. It's just bloody fucking insane.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003 .
No. RTFA:
My blog
"on-the-fly removal of expired data", aka garbage collection...
As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003 .
No. RTFA:
Why would that matter, if the code pre-existed the patent?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The patent was filed in 1997, but databases have used chained linked lists, overflow buckets, and hash tables for long before that to locate (and obviously delete items that were no longer valid) records.
Ref: Database Systems Concepts, Korth, Henry F., and Silberschatz, Abraham, University of Texas At Austin (McGraw-Hill) 1991.
The above book describes such methods as were already current at least a decade prior to publication.
And if you consider directory indexes to the multiple parts of a file as an external chained linked list, disk compression and disk caching software was doing the same thing since at least 4 years before the first filing date.
Now I'll have to search for pirated copies of Linux distro's.
> If only Florian didn't spin everything to his own personal vendetta... I might actually read his articles.
Where does he do that? I haven't been able to find him putting any personal opinions into his articles. As near as I can tell, people have been inventing random motives for him on their own. He has gotten things wrong though, but I think it's more productive to focus on whether the facts are accurate than what hit motives might be.
It doesn't really matter if East Texas is the only place in the world where this patent would be considered valid, because it's the only place future infringement lawsuits are likely to get filed. And they can, apparently, sue anyone who uses a certain version of Linux.
Hopefully, they'll redo that code if they haven't already and people will dig up prior art and kill this patent in reexamination, but until then, we have a rampaging troll on the loose. Best to kill that patent quickly.
Java used linked list chaining in hashtables as of Java 1.2. This patent is bloody absurd.
I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973. And he talks about ways of refining, and how the keys need to be adapted when the contents of the table changes if you want to retain uniqueness (which he doesn't consider worth the effort), He goes on for a number of pages. But please remember that this was not original research on his part. He was merely reporting on commonly used techniques and analyzing them. And he often didn't go into details. He only had so much space. (And he was recoding everything to work in MIX, which made I/O especially problematic.) But Corman was FAR from being the first word on Hash Table implementations. (In college, sometime in the 1970's, we talked about chaining hash tables and various implementations. Given the limitations on storage [RAM & punch cards...not disk or tape] you can bet we spent a lot of time making sure dead data didn't continue taking up space...though we didn't always properly clear it, merely deallocated it.)
So the "patent", by this "Doctrine of Equivalents" and "After-invented technology" would be considered a mere refinement of standard approaches. If the judge and jury are idiots, or possibly just not interested in justice, one can hope that some appeals court will notice this. (And hope that Google already has it in the court records, because otherwise the appeals courts won't be allowed to notice it.)
But the existence of that patent is further evidence that the patent system needs to be totally scrapped, and all extant patents be considered invalid, because of the malfeasance of the USPTO. I don't think it possible that mere misfeasance could lead to the current mess, though I suppose that there are some other felonies that would also be applicable. Fraud comes to mind. Possibly accepting bribes, though that would need to be proven, as it's not directly shown by the evidence to hand. But "improperly performing their duties in a way calculated to unjustly benefit some parties and unjustly injure others" seems like a good characterization. It might, however, be difficult to prove that they intended the injustice.
All in all, I don't think filing appropriate criminal charges against the offfice-holders at the USPTO would be very successful, however justified it might be. Much better would be to just declare the entire mess corrupt and revoke all existing patents and patent rulings (on, e.g., what can be patented). And then re-write the law into something that can actually be honestly applied.
At that, patent law probably isn't as bad as copyright law. Patents still expire. They may not reveal anything useful, but after they've expired they form a valid basis for claiming that some new patent is invalid. So they do have some good features. Copyrights, however, essentially never expire. And they are allowed to be used to cover items which are protected by a DRM that will definitely render that material "protected" unreadable before the copyright even comes up for renewal. (OTOH, copyrights are granted freely, and without formally filing. But someone else having produced essentially the same work previously isn't protection against a modified idea being copyrighted. In fact, even being in public domain now appears to no longer be protection.)
Have I given the impression that I consider the legal system corrupt? Compared the the legislators it's pure as the driven snow. Then there's the president...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't care if Texas is lawsuit happy in the patent department.
The better the wheels of justice are greased the better off we are. Litigation moves so damn slow these days that lawsuits are often decided on who blinks first at a winner take all staring contest decided in large part by whoever has a bigger legal budget.
My only concern would be if Texas was biased in some manner.
Java has been using chained linked lists in hashtables since 1.2. Adding garbage collection to it isn't exactly difficult or innovative. I'll wager someone did that long before these guys patented it. Maybe not in a standard library, but it's virtually guaranteed that something like this was implemented in software prior to their filing.
This is why the patent system needs, at the very least, a massive overhaul and an abolition on software patents.
Except that thanks to stare decisis, no new evidence can be introduced anymore.
Well, that is definitely covered in Knuth, Volume 3. I assumed that it was some kind of garbage collection on hash table entries, which Knuth alludes to but doesn't as obviously cover. (In other words, he considered what I thought this was, but considered it too complex an idea to present in one chunk, so he covered different parts of it under different headings, and only mentioned that they could be combined, rather that working out the entire algorithm in MIX.)
This puts the date back around 1973, except that Knuth was documenting and analyzing current practice rather than innovating. So he was mentioning that the practice was current BEFORE 1973. (Probably by 1970 at the very latest.) Which was well before any software was considered patentable.
So what these people are doing is patenting current practices which had been in current practice for over 20 years.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I believe that chaining hash tables is somewhere in Knuth. Which means that it came out before 1980. Yes, on page 507 of volume 3 he talks about "search methods commonly known as hashing or scatter search", so these were COMMON in 1973.
You'd think that one of the 10,000 uber-geniuses at Google would have noticed that and brought it to the attention of their lawyers.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I think the biggest problem with outfits like Google is that they're populated by guys in their 20s and 30s who seem to think that everyone worked with abacuses and vacuum tubes prior to 1990, and little realize the monumental amount of R&D and computing theory done in the 60s and 70s. Guys out of labs at IBM, MIT and Bell pretty much thought up one way or another the vast amount of "new technology" that everyone uses today. Maybe instead of hiring legal guns and relying on the non-existent historical perspective of a lot of coders and software engineers being pumped out today, guys like Google when going against patent trolls should roll out the old guns from that heady era when so many of these algorithms and approaches were developed. That way, when some evil patent attorney declares "My clients invented this in 1996" some old dude from MIT can slap down his thesis from 1968 and say "Fuck you, you lying cunt, me and the boys dreamed that one up over a hash pipe."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It doesn't really matter if East Texas is the only place in the world where this patent would be considered valid, because it's the only place future infringement lawsuits are likely to get filed.
And then one of the cases will get appealed to a higher court, and if that higher court does not agree with the East Texas ruling, it will get overturned and no future case will get decided that way even in East Texas. 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).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed,
Now this bit is just bad design. Garbage collection should not be a side effect of searching. It might make sense to do garbage collection on write if space is limited, but deleting expired records should happen as part of a distinct operation.
Unless I am reading this wrong. I wonder if the infringing code in linux could be rewritten around this?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Depends on whether it gets remanded or not. As it stands, they did prove that it wasn't a valid patent- but the Jury believed "the little guy's attornies" all the same. There's a distinct anti-corporation bent in East Texas and many of the prospective Jurors on these cases aren't as tech savvy as we might be- which is why they do a lot of the Patent Troll litigation there.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
...the bad guy can win.
Yup, booting all the intellectuals out of the jury can sway things considerably.
Ask John Carmack about that and he'll tell you about having to settle over a patent on "Carmack's Reverse" taken out by Creative Labs some time after he wrote it.
With software patents you can't win even if the technique is named after you before somebody else files the patent.
Knuth told us and the patent office how bad it would get with software patents in 1994.
Indeed. However, I see another Bilski type case coming out of this one if Google drives it home like it ought to. It's pretty bogus relative to that decision to begin with.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I still would not be at all surprised to find prior art.
I wouldn't either. Hash tables with linked lists are in my undergrad notes from 1977. It's in every curriculum, I'm sure.
Oh, yes, the patent also involves garbage collection on the fly. That reminds me, Hans Koomen and I did a implementation of Interlisp right around then too. It had that. I forget where we picked up the algorithm, it was so long ago, but I remember thinking how great it was that the principles had already been developed by the time we needed them.
Those were the days when people were still using rotary-dial telephones, mind you. The patent in question was granted on April 6, 1999.
To summarize: according to the claim, this patent combines two known techniques in what I would regard as an obvious manner. The patent only covers garbage collection on a particular type of data object. Back in the seventies the existing art was already sufficient for managing all data objects.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Either way, I hope so. Most of the patent trolls that have filed in East Texas have been of the troll variety. I would have to google more than the anecdotal evidence of overturned rulings and such. It's a task I'll take on in the near future. :)
No matter what the outcome, THIS is why I loathe software patents. (and anyone else who's not batshit insane or stupid.)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I used it in my data structures class way back in 1986. A hash table whose entries are head pointers to linked lists hardly qualifies as an advanced data structure. But I think this patent covers more than just that part.
The patent is still bogus, though, like all software patents.
Think how fast litigation would move if software and idea patents were illegal, like they used to be. There would be no trial, no lawyers, no judges, no one sucking off of other peoples innovation.
Now, if I write some code that does caching, Bedrock can sue me. They can sue anyone using Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. as they all have caching modules. Bedrock didn't invent caching, it's been around since memory was invented. DNS, HTTP, any web browser uses caching, most of which existed before Bedrock or the patent.
The logical conclusion for these idea vampires is to create an idea patent that states ownership of "the process of litigation against others using any patented idea." Then they could get a cut from any lawyer that sues any company with patents.
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You know it would be a rather interesting thing to take this and run a political game with it. Spin political marketing vilifying software patents as a threat to the existence of iPhones, iPads, etc.. Don't make it technical, don't provide any details, play a pure and simple brainwash campaign like was done with healthcare reform and the "death panels." Target the old people. Tell them that these patents seek to ban medical devices. etc...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Sorry for the troll, but I live an hour from the area, and have had dealings in the area for years. It's pretty, but there's nothing there, and I mean nothing, besides big-eared, banjo-playing, sister-marrying, back-woods country fucks. The Klan thrives out in that neck of the woods. Litigation is the only industry they've got out there, besides some heavy industry in the southern section (Beaumont). There's lovely Jasper (famous for dragging black men behind pickups), Fabulous Woodville, and don't forget Orange, Center and Pineland. This place makes Pasadena and Deer Park look like the Hamptons. The fact that nothing good comes out of East Texas is not much of surprise- The people in that place remind me of the bad parts of Eastern Europe (had to spend time there, too.). I'm surprised that the more edi-cated of them managed to come up with a scam to bring some wealth to the area.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote a great article about it:
Idiotic Anti-Linux & Google Patent Decision
Red Hat has sued Bedrock to get the patent revoked for numerous reasons. Among others, they point out that Linux, which dates to 1991, predates the 1997 patent; that no one has ever used the patent; and that in any case Bedrock has no claims to the patent
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/idiotic-anti-linux-google-patent-decision/8736
And PJ commented on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article:
"If I might remind you, Mike Anderer told us years ago, back in 2004, that this was Microsoft's plan, to see to it that FOSS companies got sued over and over again for patent infringement, until they gave out: "In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." So that's what he said. And 50 or more lawsuits lined up means using proxies, obviously. Remember Microsoft trying to sell some of its patents that read on Linux, or so they claimed, to patent trolls? OIN played man in the middle on that one, but who is to say that was the only one? That's why it's an antitrust issue, I'd say, using patents like this as an anticompetitive weapon. And if you want to know what is wrong with software patents, the damage they are doing, read the quotations from various business executives (like Andy Grove) in the footnotes to this article.]"
http://groklaw.net/
BTW: the F/OSS company, CitiWare, mentioned in the first slashdot article about Bedrock, is apparently out of business. I wonder if they were sued out of business?
I wouldn't get too worked up about this.
Except that is this is only one of several such lawsuits, and there may be many more on the way.
PJ, at Groklaw, suspects that Microsoft is behind these lawsuits, and she suspects that there are many more on the way.
If I might remind you, Mike Anderer told us years ago, back in 2004, that this was Microsoft's plan, to see to it that FOSS companies got sued over and over again for patent infringement, until they gave out
I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue.
http://groklaw.net/
Why are you so sure? I think this same company successfully sued Red Hat, and other companies. In Slashdot's 2009 article about Bedrock, Bedrock was suing a F/OSS company called CitiWare. Now CitiWare is, apparently, out of business.
Most of those uber-geniuses were not yet even born in 1970 :)
Don't quote me on this.
the patent is 1999
Even when I was a know-it-all 25yo, I still knew that Important Stuff was discovered before I was born...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I'm sure they did.
I used an 'infringing' data structure in 1997, when I was 16 and a novice C developer playing with a small beowulf cluster.
These structures are so unbelievably common it blows my mind that the prior art did not make the courtroom lynch the plaintiffs. That this was decided in favor of the Bedrock patentwhores (which is a far better term than patent trolls, I feel) has made me a very sad panda.
What are we all working for, when some dickhead hires a lawyer and sues everyone for a 35-year old idea?
Maybe I'm just a conspiracy nut, but I think it's possible this was a tactical move on Google's part. Of course Google knew about the prior art if random jackasses (myself included) on slashdot can think of it and go look it up. My sincere hope is that they lost this case in order to appeal it, and the appeal will go all the way to the supreme court, and put an end to this madness. Perhaps its a pipe dream, but it's possible.... Right??
...Or maybe the patent lawyers themselves already know of Knuth, since that's first on the list of prior art.
So the "patent"... would be considered a mere refinement of standard approaches.
That's exactly what innovation generally is. Personally, I doubt mankind has had an original thought in the past few thousand years, and even that's giving a lot more credit to the Greeks than I think they deserve. Everything is based on or inspired by something else.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Clean-on-access is a little strange, but not that uncommon.
As it stands, they did prove that it wasn't a valid patent- but the Jury believed "the little guy's attornies" all the same
The jury was never asked to rule on the validity of the patent.
The jury was asked three questions which must be answered consistently:
[Paraphrased]
1 Did Bedrock prove by the weight of the evidence presented here that Google infringed on its patent?
On Claim 1 - Yes. On Claim 2 - Yes.
2 Did Google prove by the weight of the evidence presented here that it did not infringe on the patent?
On Claim 1 - No. On Claim 2 - No.
3 If you find that the patent was infringed, what would be fair and reasonable compensation for Bedrock, based on the weight of the evidence presented here?
$ 5 million.
Bedrock v. Google
For the case to reach the jury in this form, Google must have lost every argument with the judge at every stage in the case where the validity of the patent could be contested.
That does not bode well for an appeal.
The jury trial was demanded in this case - and it is an expensive and high-risk proposition.
The appellate court judge does not second-guess a jury on matters of fact.
The most he is likely to allow is an argument that any damages awarded were "excessive."
Neither are you likely to get very far arguing that the jury was biased or incompetent.
But did your hash-pipe-induced idea involve exactly what's claimed in the patent, and no less? Is every single claim of the patent covered somewhere in your dissertation? Not in four separate projects over the course of 20 years, but all the ideas in a single location? No? Then please don't waste the court's time.
Nobody's trying to diminish the contributions of researchers in the 60s and 70s. Computer science has moved on, and further progress is being made by refining and extending earlier techniques. Do you really mean to imply that all computing progress stopped after 1979? What is happening now is that techniques from the 70s which were impractical at the time (though better in theory) can now be utilized. More use means more bright minds thinking about them, and more improvements. Those improvements can (and often should be) be patented, as they're the result of an investment in research. I'm terribly sorry if some researcher in the 70s dreamed up a great data structure and never got anything for it, but that's no reason to deny others the opportunity to profit from today's theoretical work.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Or... "Linux" could just dump the markets with patent laws from lalaland and see how far they get without cheap/free server OSs. I mean, it's not like "Linux" would lose any revenue that way...
To explain those quotes: "Linux" can't buy patents. Even in the US an OS has not been granted person status and thus the ability to own property.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That part about Microsoft might be true, but certainly Microsoft has been hurt more by software patents than they've ever hurt Linux.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hopefully this doesn't set a precedent. Lawyers like these people really are scum. On a side note, it is interesting to think about how BSD had its own legal battles with AT&T back in the day, resulting in the 4.4 BSD-Lite systems from which the major BSD Distributions/Operating Systems today stem from. While I decry the activities of Bedrock Company with regards to the Linux kernel (read: not "operating system), I do think it goes to show the importance of licenses.
Restating old research or techniques developed thirty years ago and slapping your own patent on it isn't a theft against the initial inventor, at best it's a mistake and at worst it's fraud. If there's prior art, that's supposed to be the end of the road.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But I really wish these "patent trolls" and their ilk would get the fuck out of Texas -- they're making us normal Texans look bad.
This is one of many. They started long ago. Microsoft is indeed holding up puppets to push these things, but I'm not sure this one is a Microsoft puppet this time. This one looks like a lawyer who's learned just enough to be a danger to himself and society. Given the human condition there are sociopaths in every field of human endeavor. I don't even think Microsoft is herding this one yet, though I doubt they're above that.
These sick people test the edges of the game. They seek cracks in the logic of jurisprudence that they can work to their aims. They're brilliant at this obsession. In a nation of some hundred millions we'll not be rid of these creeps ever. The goal is only profit for the lawyer. We all know people like this: the litigious who would rather find cause to sue somebody than do honest service or make a good product or sell it. They'll spill the current progress of every suit they're invoved in to anyone who will listen. They're best avoided.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Have you read the trial transcript?
Oh, jeebus. Now you've done it. I've enjoyed some of your bits but you may as well check in this alt now, hairyfeet. You're about to be modded to the point where you can't be seen.
You may as well be a Birther on this. PJ has done more to expose the malfeasance in IT than any other this past decade. Her blog's fans brought us the full text of the BSD settlement agreement. She has shone a light on the dire dealings of the analysts, the lawyers, the custom venues. Her efforts have thwarted many a program that would lead us to darkness. Her blog is now archived in the Library of Congress.
What PJ's done for us won't stop happening for 20 years or more. Just one meek example can be found here. You won't bother to assimilate that, nor will many who read this - but enough people have done so to know what you are.
There are hundreds of these. Against your contempt I would ask: what have YOU done? Don't answer. We don't really care. We know now who you're for and why, or you'd not be attacking PJ.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I say we round up all the patent trolls, borrow the locals' guns, and shoot every one of them (the patent trolls, that is). It's a terrible shame that we have to live in a country (and due to the influence the U.S. has, a world) so hostile to innovation. Gun rights advocates say that we have to have guns to protect our freedom. If that's the case, isn't it about time we put them to good use?
(I'm not really advocating killing people, though the thought of thousands of patent troll corpses and a collapse of the current patent system brightens my day.)
Now we're starting to quote Harry Potter? Really?
Please, turn in your geek card as you leave /. forever.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I wasn't, but it actually doesn't matter. I've worked with people who were active researchers in the '70s, and they're still completely unaware of some of the great work that was done in that era and the '80s. A huge amount of work was largely discarded because the computers required to use it were too expensive. I regularly take ideas from papers on programming language implementation from the '80s that were largely ignored at the time because the processing or memory requirements were insane. Of course, the insanely powerful computer people were using back then had far less RAM or processor power than a modern smartphone, let alone a desktop or laptop, so things that were intellectual curiosities back then have practical applications now.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why? When you're searching, you're pulling the data into the CPU cache. While it's there, doing a small modification is pretty cheap. The only concern that I'd have with this approach is that it makes it slightly harder to reason about the run time of a search, but that's already nondeterministic if you're allowing chaining (if you want bounded search times, use something like a hopscotch hash).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We dont have software patents in the real world.
Not entirely true. Despite patent law saying otherwise, European patent offices often grant patents for "computer implemented inventions".
But even so, the vast majority of these patent lawsuits seems to happen in the USA. So I wonder:
If companies like Bedrock make life difficult enough for Linux use and development in the USA, will we eventually have European Linux developers who say "fuck this, we make our own version that ignores all US patents"?
C - the footgun of programming languages
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Why does this remind me so much of that episode of the Knight Rider where Michael ends up in a Town in Texas where everyone is corrupt from the Sheriff to the Judge?
Anyway, not that it's gonna happen but I would love that this case kicked some judge and troll butt once and for all. As I said, it's not gonna happen thanks to the broken legal system, but gosh wouldn't it be nice...
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
As far as the linux kernel goes? They've picked a very specific release train. 2.4.22, which came out in 25-Aug-2003 .
No. RTFA:
The start kernel is a very specific release because they had no reason to start there. 2.4.x was from a time when there were no new features added to kernels so the code was likely there for 2.4.1 (30 jan 2001) and assuming the 2.4.x series kernel was the first kernel with the feature it would have been added somewhere in the 2.3.x experimental series (May 1999 - May 2000). The fun question is now: did the 2.2.x series kernel infringe?
Concurrent access: Trying to make a clean distinction between read only and read/write transactions.
Dealing with load: do your garbage collection when things are quiet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
well the answer to that is for all tech companies to move all their operations out of texas - ok it will suck for Austin but hey you cant make an omlette.
It came to Creative Labs via a presentation to a Creative Labs developer forum by Nvidia's Sim Dietrich.
Several people knew about it months before Creative Labs heard about it and started on the paperwork let alone filed the patent.
Creative Labs also agreed to let Carmack use his proir implementation royalty free.
Software patents are an insane innovation designed to make a few quick dollars for the public purse but instead are a burden on the legal system and a brake on the economy. In bad SF some foreign enemy would trick the USA into introducing such a thing so that we could no longer compete internationally in the field of software - in reality extreme home grown stupidity did the job instead.
Wow - I was doing that back in '94 and maybe even earlier. And in discussion with other developers at the time, the implementation was obvious. Its not exactly rocket science. You have a bucket which holds one item. You need to hold multiple items. How do you resolve that? There are a finite number of ways to resolve the issue and all of which are obvious to anyone how is looking to resolve the issue.
I don't care what the judge says, if your summary is accurate, its entirely invalidated as being obvious, regardless of prior art. And frankly, I can't imagine there not being almost limitless prior art.
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I'm hoping that this sets a precedent for invalidating software patents in general by demonstrating that you were infringing on the patent years before it was granted.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Don't expect Texas, which is a state, to do anything about the Federal court district in Texas, which is a Federal court run by the Federal government. Do you understand the difference between a state and a federation of states?
Care to be specific? Please give me a specific example of something PJ published that is provably "loonie."
I suspect you are just trying to smear Groklaw, in order to shill for Microsoft. Prove me wrong.
In all the years that groklaw has existed, I cannot think of one thing published that is provable false. But, that does not seem to slow down the Microsoft smear campaign.
Houston is in eastern Texas. Ever heard of the Johnson Space Center? Or gasoline?
I just GAVE you an example, it isn't my job to be your research assistant. You HAVE heard of this thing called a search engine, yes? look up "Groklaw PsyStar" and see for yourself. You can go "la la la" and stick your head in the sand if you want, doesn't make her less of a loonie.
Look I'm happy to give credit where credit is due, PJ was GREAT on the SCO case, she really was. But like BoycottNovell she became one of those that would blame the loss of the rainforest on a MSFT plot. Or do you wish to explain how PsyStar was actually a secret M$ plant to destroy the GPL?
Because THAT is the tune she was singing. Don't believe me look it up. And I LOVE how FOSSies simply mod down when their emperors and sacred cows have no clothes. Look it up, I DARE YOU, see the lunacy first hand. You WILL see if you read her post SCO posts that she began stretching more and more AND MORE trying to get the planet to fit her "M$ VS GPL" mindset, and like BoycottNovell the levels of crazy got pretty thick. Hell find more than two posts of her post SCO period where she DIDN'T find every single thing that could possibly go wrong come from M$! Did your desktop crash? IT is M$'S fault!
Don't blame the messenger if you don't like the message, look it up. Or are YOU one of those that believe Twitter and friends at BoycottNovell that everything bad in the entire universe is a M$ plot? Because PJ does.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wish I could mod this up. That was exactly what I though of when I read their claim.
-a.d.-
I'm Erwin Schrodinger and I approve of this message, and I do not approve of this message!
They cite Knuth's AoCP in the patent. They're not claiming the hash table is the innovation..
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That's the "beauty" of this system.
You can be declared owner and monopolist of something that any number of other people in the field can recreate in total isolation.
You basically get to be declared owner of the state of the art.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If anyone were simply restating research for a patent, that would indeed be fraud, but that's not what's happening at Google (or anywhere else reputable, for that matter). Instead, old techniques are being reexamined and improved, and those improvements are being patented. To quote Newton, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." Nostalgia aside, research done in the 60s and 70s did not reach the absolute end of progress in its areas.
The patent in this article, for example, claims both a linked list and a chaining hash table, where the lists used remove expired items whenever they're traversed. The novel and non-obvious improvement is the removal of expiring items upon access. This means that plain old hash tables and linked lists are not prior art in any way that invalidates the patent. If you could find an example of such a self-cleaning list prior to 1999, I'm sure Google would love to hear about it.
As another example, consider Google's patent on MapReduce. The concept of "translate sets, then combine sets" is certainly quite old, but that's not what's being patented. What's actually covered is the specific mechanism used to manage the processing tasks on a cluster, including allocation of workload, tables used, and the addition of intermediate steps to aid processing.
If you'd like to prove me wrong, please feel free to point out any patent from Google (or other reputable company) that is wholly implemented in something from the 70's.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Microsoft has a whole lot of money and can afford to budget some of the revenue from each of their products for patent payoffs. The worst thing software patents will do to their business is reduce profitability.
Free/Open Source software does not work like that. The licenses typically exclude having to pay somebody on a per-copy basis.
More specifically, the GPL, from GPLv2 on, has forbidden distribution with more restrictions than are allowed in the GPL. Since the Linux kernel is under GPLv2, it is illegal to distribute it if there is any patent encumbrance.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It's fucking garbage collection, for christsakes. Non-obvious? My ass. It's blatantly obvious. It's a crap patent.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Maybe the big guys should be doing this anyways. Pop on to places like Slashdot, say, "Hey, we're being sued over software patent xxx, here's the details, can anyone categorize some prior art." Particularly if this is to do with open source, they'll get a helluva lot of smart guys giving some free legal help.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Citiware had already stopped doing business prior to the lawsuit, never had any business in the State of Texas and was actually a LLC originally formed in Colorado, not Texas. The lawsuit just included the firm because the owner lived in East Texas and the domain name showed his personal address in East Texas with the company name. They needed companies local to East Texas to keep this lawsuit in the patent crazy East Texas and claimed whatever they could find locally.
Check the references on that wikipedia page yourself for a start.
Yeah, sure, Google could never get any historical perspective out its young ultra-hot-shots like Rob Pike.
What's really irritating is that every penny of settlement cash will only serve to fund more patent trolling.
It seems to me, as a foreigner, that the U.S. gov't should be stepping in to apply corrective discipline to the Texas legal system, and ideally to the entire country. Texas is renown for favouring patent trolls, which I can only assume is a fantastic gravy train for the judges and lawyers over there. They are, stereotypically, too self-centered and perhaps too ignorant to realize their actions are leading the nation to ruin.
Patent troll companies should not be allowed to exist. In my opinion, patents should be non-transferable. What sense does it make to have a pack of underemployed lawyers hold IP for technology they cannot even begin to comprehend ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Concurrent access: Trying to make a clean distinction between read only and read/write transactions.
Not really a problem. Atomic removal of items from a linked list (which is what they're using for secondary chaining) is pretty trivial - just atomically update the next pointer of the previous one, then defer reusing the removed node (in the case of the kernel, this can be done trivially by adding it to a queue which is deleted periodically after every kernel thread has been scheduled for long enough to complete one list iteration.
Dealing with load: do your garbage collection when things are quiet.
There are a great many problems with this idea. The garbage increases the cost of the search, and the time that this matters most is at high load. If you defer collection until the load is low, then you defer collection until after the time when it would have had the highest impact. If you do it incrementally, then you are cleaning up the hot parts of the data structure when they're hot, which improves overall performance and especially improves performance under load.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I dread to think about the numbers of closed source projects which infringe 'patents' and get away with it by abstracting the behaviour of the third party code they've used. I think software patents are a farcical notion which aims to undermine logic itself, it certainly escapes mine.
Looking at or through this code, you hearby agree to the End License User Agreement, henceforth ELUA.
You may not accuse or bring to court of law anything you see herein which you may erroneously believe to be an infringement of your stupid abstract patent.
It's too bad that software patents can't be abolished. They cause so much harm and discourage innovation and freedom. Thankfully open source and Linux is very adaptive, so hopefully it can be changed to avoid these silly patent suits.
2.4.22 was one of the last releases before 2.6 was released. During that time, many features were being backported from the 2.5 series kernels. I don't know where the feature in question came from, but whether or not it was in 2.4.0 or 2.4.1 isn't clear to me.
My blog
Exactly, so it isn't "not obvious to a practitioner in the art" which is the requirement for patent grant. Should get tossed immediately when Google appeal.