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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?
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?
Laugh all you want, but RMS keeps getting proved right over and over about Free Software.
Not necessarily. It is likely that Twin Peaks kept it under their hat until Red Hat's deeper pockets were firmly committed.
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.
It's a little more sticky for Twin Peaks than that. The geographic limitation would prevent them from distributing their software under GPL anywhere where they assert a patent right. So to comply they would have to grant a royalty free license to all (including Red Hat) OR just never sell the product again.
They would at least have to review their codebase and carefully purge all signs of GPL code to get back in business, but would still have to settle the past infringement.
Typically in GPL violations, the infringer is given the opportunity to cure the infringement without going to court, but then there isn't usually a patent suit in play.
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.