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Uniloc Patent Case Against Rackspace Tossed for Bogus Patents

Posted by Unknown on from the don't-mess-with-red-hat dept.

netbuzz writes "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for [Linux] allegedly infringing upon [Uniloc's] patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: 'In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.'" You can't patent floating point math after all.

3 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Worthless by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You know your patent case is worthless when East Texas courts throw it out. If you can't win your troll case there it's friggin' hopeless.

  2. One of these days .... by pollarda · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Perhaps they will realize that computers can only do what you can already do with a pencil and piece of paper. (They just do it all much faster.) Given that, it is all simply algorithms which are unpatentable. (Of course, if you use the computer to control things, then your piece of paper can be replaced with a joystick or whatever.)

    1. Re:One of these days .... by Whatsisname · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The little rubber boot is not even remotely something that patents should protect. You are subscribing to the faulty, revisionist "dibs" model of patents.

      The bargain made in patents is that society provides protection, in exchange for the inventor disclosing how their machine works. The alternative, as was the case prior to patents, was that guilds were very secretive about their processes and technologies, and if something happened to the guild, the technology disappeared along with them. The patent bargain was made to bring their technological secrets into the public domain.

      In the case of a rubber boot on an ethernet cable, there is nothing to disclose. You can figure out all there is to it by looking at it for 2 seconds. There is nothing consequential for society to reverse engineer in lieu of a patent. Protecting a rubber boot with patent protection is a terrible deal for society.