Yahoo Beats Patent Troll That Beat Google

jfruhlinger writes "You may recall the saga of patent troll Bedrock, which claims that it has patents over Linux and successfully sued Google over Google's Linux use. Well, the verdict from Bedrock's suit against Yahoo on similar grounds has come in — and Yahoo is victorious, not least because Yahoo went second and got to see how the arguments in the Google case went."

Comments

And the perfect car analogy would be:

[zill]

Slipstreaming.

Re:Appeal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you can add 2 and 3 like that? Patent Approved!

- USPTO worker #217

Re:Appeal?

[Desler]

Just as I expected:

"First off, Bedrock had a stronger case against Google. Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial). Yahoo, on the other hand, used a different form of Linux, and its lead trial lawyer, Yar Chaikovsky and Fay Morisseau of McDermott Will, were able to argue that Yahoo never executed the Bedrock code."

The case against Google was much stronger hence they were found to infringe. So since the cases seem to not be exactly the same, I'm guessing that Google bringing up Yahoo's case is going to mean very little to the appeal's court.

Re:Appeal?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Best patent I've found? Computing the absolute value of an integer. Yes, really.

int v;
int const mask = v >> sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT - 1;
v = (v ^ mask) - mask;

Currently owned by Oracle, previously by Sun.

Re:software patent

[garyebickford]

Until (IIRC) 1986, that was the case. Software is composed of algorithms, and algorithms are by definition mathematics, and mathematics can only be discovered, not invented. So until 1986 no software patents were awarded. I think the first one was a Honeywell patent for a combined hardware/software system for an air conditioning controller.

The most egregiously bad deal about software patents is the huge list of software inventions going back to the dawn of computing, for really important stuff like virtual memory, dozens of compiler methods, the windowing GUI, many different aspects of the systems that underlie the internet, etc., that could not be patented - in retrospect those thousands of real inventors got a raw deal. I made several advances in my work in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could now be patented. All those innovations back then were either shared effectively as open source, or protected for a while as trade secrets. Now trolls can patent silly trivialities and make zillions of dollars, depending on a huge edifice of real work that they get to use for free.

And, of course, if those innovations could have been patented the entire industry would be 30 years behind where we are now.