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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 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.
Cancel that retirement party
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
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.
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.
Yep that's exactly what happens when you allow patents on raw ideas rather than specific and detailed implementations. No software patent should be valid without the source code detailing the implementation where simply changing code to work differently completely avoids the patent. Of course if that was the case nearly every software patent would be gone with the exception of things like the RSA patents where changing the code would make it no longer work.
The problem with the patent office is that when they started allowing companies to patent raw ideas in the form of software and business method patents suddenly you could get a patent for an idea with no implementation, make it as vague as possible and then sue everyone. And that's exactly what's been happening and getting more and more common. It's the reason the courts are being overwhelmed with patent suits and it's also the reason the patent office is being swarmed with patent applications. Reinforce the old rule that requires that the patent detail a specific implementation (and in the case of a software patent that means the source code is part of the patent) and much of the problems with the patent system will go away. The side benefit is all but the most important and innovative software inventions are no longer patentable and business method patents go away entirely.
Ah but we can hope the upcoming patent cases before the Supreme reach exactly this conclusion and reverse the nastiness the court created when they essentially allowed business method patents by invalidating previous tests. The only valid patent system is one that deals in specific implementations.
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?
Using a linked list that the hash bucket points to -- hence, external chaining... Yep, nothing new here, standard hash table practice, as opposed to moving the collision to a different unoccupied bucket.
and on-the-fly removal of expired data - "on-the-fly" is a nice buzzword, but this is also nothing new.
I built a connection to player# firewall/database for a simple game server in 1996 (patent filed in 1997). I used a single hash table to store valid open connections and blocked connections. The packed IP address was used as the key (hashed), and an external linked list per hash bucket was used to resolve collisions. If more than one connection mapped to a bucket, it was added to the bucket's external linked list. Each connection (linked list item) had an IP address, port#, validity flag, and time-stamp; The later I used to automatically remove expired connections -- as I traversed the hash table. HOW IS THIS NOT BLOODY OBVIOUS to a professional skilled in the art of hash tables and faced with the problem of expiring bucket entries?! The patent is invalid.
The patent is clearly in violation of my prior art, and doubtlessly many thousands of other's. Fortunately, my source code for that BS game is closed -- no patent troll can figure out the method I'm using and sue me..... The patent (troll) system makes it more beneficial for me to hide innovation -- The opposite of it's intended goal. Linux source code is open, ergo, a broad target for trolls.
So apparently we can just mix and match random old techniques, and call it innovation and get it patented?
Yep. Apparently that's what they did. If someone else hasn't already patented it, you'll get a patent for it, no matter how obvious. The obviousness clause is not actually applied to patents. The patent database is searched for prior art, and applications granted if none is found.
What I find interesting is the "Method AND Apparatus" terms that all these software patents must use in order to link them to hardware and thus make them patentable -- Without the apparatus, they are not patentable.
A patent is public information, the detailed description is required to be published, no doubt in a textual form.
An "infringing" bit of open source software source code is simply a detailed description of a patent. Ergo, source code must not actually be infringing since it is not an apparatus, it is simply performing the same exact task that a patent claim performs -- describing the patented method in detail.
If a translation from the patent claim text to source code text is not an infringement, then a binary representation of such text must also not be an infringement -- A PDF displaying example source code that allegedly infringes a patent dose not itself infringe the patent -- It's just a document / file...
Compiling source code is merely translating it into another binary representation, just like translating a patent claim into example source code is not an infringement, and the PDF translation is not an infringement, a binary executable translation is not an infringement either!
Only when you add the apparatus to the method by running the software should the patent be enforcible. Prior to running the executable code the software is purely a description of the method employed.
A patent suit must not be able force the source code of a "patent infringing" open source project to be taken down -- Otherwise, we must also remove from public view ALL PUBLIC PATENT information.
Distribution of a PDF that descri
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
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/