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Red Hat Fights Patent Troll With GPL
jfruh writes "Red Hat is in the middle of a patent lawsuit with Twin Peaks Software, which claims that a Red Hat subsidiary is abusing a Twin Peaks filesystem lawsuit. Now, Red Hat is launching an intriguing countermeasure: the company claims that Twin Peaks' own closed source software violates the GPL because it makes use of an open source disk utility that Red Hat holds the copyright on. Is this a smart move on Red Hat's part?"
It's a patent RedHat is accused of "abusing".
Doesn't seem to be a Patent Troll if the company has a product. Trolls are generally Non Practicing Entities. Are we going to start calling Apple, Google, and Microsoft patent trolls now?
RedHat must have known about this before they acquired Gluster ...
It seems like patent lawsuits are a good marketing strategy these days to get press. Any press is good press I guess.
This is brilliant! Just accuse them of a GPL violation and they'll be forced to prove their source code is different by revealing it.
It's a wonder nobody has done this before.
If the Twin Peaks patent is on GPL-violating code, then that would seem to me (IANAL) to be a clear and direct example of prior art. You'd have a case of an entity stealing work, then patenting it, and then attacking the people they stole from. That could be an incredibly embarassing thing for Twin Peaks. OTOH, if the GPL infringement is on unrelated code, then I would imagine that there could be seperate verdicts that each could be found guilty on. The question there would be: Are the damages comparable enough to force a settlement?
Fight fire with fire.
But in the end, the lawyers win.
Be seeing you...
It depends if they win or not.
Normally with these patent cases both sides own patents and what normally ends up is an agreement to share each other patents. the GNU Forbids Patents, so copyright is the next best thing, perhaps it is even bigger then the patent because it is even more blatant misuse.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Laugh all you want, but RMS keeps getting proved right over and over about Free Software.
Are they intending to use clause 8 to then say that they are in violation? I read the IT World article but didn't really gether how they were intending to use the GPL to fight back other than just saying "you distribute a work based on the GPL and aren't in compliance." In which case (if indeed true) all they would have to do to settle that matter would be to release their source.
8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I know this is /., and all, but I think you failed to even read the summary. Red Hat is not suing someone with a patent claim, they are countersuing someone with a copywrite claim in response to a patent lawsuit against them.
Most software patent suits ARE trolls. Enough that it's a reasonable enough default opinion unless/until proven otherwise. The ones involving a non-practicing entity are the most obvious of them, but sometimes a practicing entity trolls as well.
Doing some VERY basic binary comparison between their mount.mfs binary and one of Redhat's mount binaries I would say there is nothing that says straight out one way or the other. There were definitely some differences (licensing crap all through twin peak's binary for instance, trying to catch if you run it and have no license) and some similarities, but it isn't enough for me personally to say for sure. I'd be going after looking at TwinPeak's source, but that's probably what they'll end up doing anyway.
Neither party in this lawsuit is a patent troll. RedHat couldn't go after Twin Peaks for a copyright violation if Twin Peaks didn't have products. In fact this is pretty much why patents held by product companies aren't as much of a threat to the economy as patents held by trolls. When a product company uses a patent offensively it always risks blowback. In this case it looks like Twin Peaks is did something pretty dumb in suing a company whose copyrights they had previously violated and had so far gotten away with. The people responsible for the suit probably didn't know about the copyright violation, but they before they sued I'm sure they wondered if they might have some skeletons in their closet that discovery might reveal. Product companies usually don't sue, they cross-license, with a payment going to the company with a better portfolio. The Apple harakiri is an exception not the rule.
Anyway, they just need to stop distributing those products for a few weeks while they write their own mount utility and either pay statutory damages to RedHat for past violations and keep the patent lawsuit going, or negotiate with RedHat for cross-licensing with a smaller payment to RedHat. The GPL license on the code doesn't really matter at all and this story isn't really worth a headline on slashdot.
if you do not use or license your patents within the first year of aquiring a patent then the patent is no longer valid. PERIOD! Having worked in the patent office and see all the patent holding companies that just sit on patents to sue people, it is time we ended this. Call it the use it or lose it law.
When it comes to software patents? Yes.
IMHO, more sensation then fact
[quote]"if Red Hat were to be successful in establishing copyright infringement and obtaining a permanent injunction," the legal blog wrote.[/quote]
If the code in question is GPL 2 licensed, and Redhat holds the copyright, then RedHat has the right to pursue the Copyright infringement. However a permanent injunction can easily be avoided by coming in compliance with the GPL 2. And as the alleged code code is just the mount tool, that should be limited to GPL license of this piece of code.
And one wrong (violation of GPL) does not cure the other wrong (patent infringement), even if both allegations can be proven correct.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
... is a good offense.
Don't tell me who did it, I want to figure out who killed Laura Palmer all on my own!
How does that help anyone in this case. Twin Peaks uses their patent. Here's a link to the product on their website:
http://twinpeaksoft.com/clustering%20plus.html
Red Hat just wants to call them a patent troll to try to turn public opinion against them.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
The Twin Peaks filesystem was an undesirable competitor to ResierFS.
It is not Red Hat that is stealing. It is Twin Peaks.
who taught this AC how to read and type but not how to understand?
Both A and B include the clause "on a medium customarily used for software interchange".
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
How can we take "Twin Peaks Software" seriously if they cannot even use spell check on their front page...
http://www.twinpeaksoft.com/
"If you are responsible for enterprise severs that many users depend on, what do you do if they demand immediate access to their files when the server is down, whether it be for service or another reason?"
s/severs/servers/ ... (in case they remove/fix it: http://capturefullpage.com/default.aspx?url=f906aa1e-0848-4c44-b544-299c10c1d9ee.jpg )
Could everyone just stop saying IANAL, we know that already.
Can I light a sig ?