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Rackspace Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls
girlmad writes "Rackspace has come out fighting against one of the U.S.'s most notorious patent trolls, Parallel Iron. The cloud services firm said it's totally fed up with trolls of all kinds, which have caused a 500 percent rise in its legal bills. Rackspace was last week named among 12 firms accused of infringing Parallel Iron's Hadoop Distributed File System patents. Rackspace is now counter-suing the troll, as the firm said it has a deal in place with Parallel Iron after signing a previous patent settlement with them."
The laws must be changed.
Rackspace is now counter-suing the troll, as the firm said it has a deal in place with Parallel Iron after signing a previous patent settlement with them.
So what they are REALLY saying is...
Honey, we left the cash on the dresser, and now you want more?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Patent trolls go after those who will settle. Let that be a lesson before paying off the next troll.
You can't make a deal with a troll. They will always come back for more. It's just their nature to be greedy assholes who want everything for nothing.
Dear Rackspace: fight the good fight.
First patent troll to stick their nose into your business, license with the proviso that now you've signed with them, any later actions by anyone else are on their head, then just point patent troll at patent troll. If they're that sure they own the patent and it's strong enough, then surely they'll be ok to step up and indemnify you from there on against others? If not, then they're not as sure of their validity as they hope and you refuse. "Oh, hello there new troll, oh, you think you own that? Well, we just license it from them, they took all the money from us, and it's them you need to speak to" and you get to the greener grass on the other side of the bridge.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
It might as well be spam in my inbox.
Why not just link the damn blog post by Rackspace itself? link
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
As I understand it, HDFS is just a clone of Google's GFS. What IP could Parallel Iron possibly own?
Oh wait...
"IP Nav told us that they could not divulge the details of their infringement claims -- not even the patent numbers or the patent owner -- unless we entered into a 'forbearance agreement' -- basically, an agreement that we would not sue them."
So they probably have nothing. How is this legal?!
you never get rid of the Dane.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Here's something a little "funny", Rackspace and Red Hat sued Uniloc over the idea of patenting mathematical algorithms, and Rackspace / Red Hat won. Guess where Uniloc parks their servers?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm not going to be happy until we get a Slashdot headline that reads something like: "Rabid Ninja Mosad Assassin Zombie Horde Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls".
Patent trolls don't make refrigerators, they make patents. So there would be no waiver because they would have no reason to license the fridge patent.
Some of these are quite laughable, if you read the article, you'll see a patent on rounding floating point numbers with non standard exponents without changing the exponent size, i.e. what every floating point package did before IEEE standardized the representation of under and overflow case.
Putting aside it was a patent on math, the patent office thought to grant it, because there was no prior publication. Yet to be a non-standard exponent-mantissa, there has to be standard. So the actual new thing there, was the IEEE standard.
You see how clever these trolls are, the definition of prior art cannot cover all cases, the patent office chooses to issue patents by default, and so its quite easy to get patents on core things, and troll. Of course Rackspace don't know the history of floating point math, so they don't have the tools/knowledge to defend themselves, the troll can attack any number of similarly tangential businesses, hoping the risk is too great that they'll license.
Carmen Ortiz would love the patent troll world, when she's finally fired from the justice department, the patent troll world is a very similar.
It would be funny to settle with the troll and have something in the contract like, "agree not to sue me or my assigns" and then assign rights to all my software patents to everybody.
IANAL and have no idea if such a thing would hold up in court; but it's no more ridiculous than most of what passes for law these days.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'll have you know you're talking about the Job Creators! The Makers, not the Takers. Those people who want to build and sell stuff are just parasites.
So that will be "Mr Investor Psychopath" from now on, if you don't mind, except "Mr Investor Psychopath" happens to be a trademark so until you get expressed written permission just keep your mouth shut and pay up, you leech.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem is with overinflated lawyers fees, court procedures which encourage paperwork which makes even more fees for lawyers and and court fees that the courts are so expensive you are looking at handing lawyers and courts two million up just to defend yourself from a patent troll. If cases were streamlined and it only cost $10K to defend a patent troll it would be far fairer, but lawyers and judges would be out of work. Have you ever heard of judges being laid off for lack of work? Judges whose communities depend on patent trolls for a steady stream of cases have a conflict of interest. If they came down hard on patent trolls and threw out meritless cases there would be boarded up lawyers offices all over town. Instead the judges say well geez better have a trial anyway just to be sure. It might get an answer but it wastes a fuckload of cash to get there. If the USPTO issued firm rulings we wouldn't need the courts. Instead the USPTO scratch their balls and say well I will just approve this shit because I can't understand it anyway and let the courts sort it out. The problem is as much the court system as it is the USPTO. They should streamline these but do you really think lawyers and judges will be putting themselves out of work?
Patents are written in bullshit confusing language so courts argue what they mean. A software engineering looking at one of these wouldn't even recognize their own system in one of these documents. Lawyers write them to be broad and confusing so they can make money arguing it. The USPTO shouldn't be approving patents that are unreadable. And if a IT graduate can't read one of these and work out what they mean, they shouldn't be granted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
http://news.cnet.com/8301-32973_3-57409792-296/how-much-is-that-patent-lawsuit-going-to-cost-you/
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/03/guest-editorial-throwing-trolls-off-the-bridge.html
Another war against Linux? Do I detect a whiff of Microsoft's scent in the air surrounding this?
:>(
Thanks for the link, and that page has even more informative links. It looks like Rackspace won a dismissal against Uniloc for a patent troll argument asserting patents on simple mathematical operations: rounding a floating point number up or down before performing a mathematical operation on it, rather than performing the math operation and then performing the rounding afterwards. The judge's dismissed Uniloc's suit stating that "simple mathematical operations are not patentable".
.
That patent was PTO#5,892,697 and only the first claim was asserted for that lawsuit.
.
Interestingly, the way the lawsuit was filed shows that Rackspace was being sued for deploying Linux servers, and the servers were claimed to be infringing # 5,892,697 because they ran Linux. Doesn't this look like another wave of concerted lawsuits and patent trolling against Linux? I wonder who the concert-master is in this case, waving the baton and funding this crazy patent assertion of rounding numbers before an op being performed rather than after the op is performed? Is there a whiff of Microsoft in the air?
Microsoft is (or should be) so busy saving its own skin it can't afford a war with anyone right now. Windows 8? Meh. Office 365? Meh. The Microsoft iPad thingie what was it called again? Yeah. Was it worth pissing off all the OEM's over? Ballmer just keeps shooting himself in the foot again and again and again. It's almost as if he wants Microsoft to fail.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes. I met one poor troll victim whose knowledge of the court system came from TV dramas and thought they would get a fair trial. $$$$ later he discovered the system is rigged in favor of lawyers and trolls. No trolls. No business. Judges are supposed to be dignified and neutral. If you get one that isn't you are fucked. http://mokellyreport.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/sterling-reviews-of-judge-natalia-combs-green/ You are right. Play the game their way and you are fucked,
Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second.
Is Microsoft parasitic? Undeniably.
For using the BSD implementation of this, that, or the other?
Uhh, no, I don't think so. Isn't BSD allowed to be used any damned way anybody wants to use it? That's the selling point of BSD over the GPL, isn't it? You can analyze it, use it, change it, make derivative works, then license those works as you see fit. It's appealing to industry, it's appealing to hopeful startups, it's even appealing to government and private individuals who are hoping to cash in.
Yes, Microsoft is parasitic, but not for using a BSD licensed software or method.
If BSD's methods and software happen to be the best, fastest, most secure, and most elegant solution in any given situation - take it and run with it. That's basically what the license says.
If the GPL people want their license to be respected, then the BSD licenses need to be respected.
And, lest I be misunderstood - I am NOT making an argument that BSD is better than GPL, nor am I arguing that GPL is better than BSD.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It surprises me that this hasn't become a policy before. Patent trolls exist because they know that the company will roll over if it's cheaper to comply than to fight.
Problem is, that only works for a single stage game. What we have is a repeated stage game. The optimal strategy for the troll victim is to fight, and to do as much damage to the troll as possible. This increases the cost of operation for the troll, and makes the victim a lot less lucrative a target for future lawsuits.
In mathematics, the analysis of rounding operations is nontrivial, and in general making a choice about rounding before or after some other operation can sometimes be extremely clever. So while the judge made ultimately the right decision, his justification based on labelling the claims "simple mathematical operations" seems woefully inadequate, suggesting that he has no clue at all. His official argument should at least be based on a more substantive understanding of whatever the system claims to do.
This reminds me of another famous example when a bunch of non-mathematicians decided they had figured out some simple mathematical operations.
re: IMHO, mathematics should not be patentable AT ALL and IN ANY FORM.
:>)
My humble opinion is that you are completely correct. I agree with you 100% (as that is the maximum allowed by the laws of mathematics, though the laws of idiomacy allow for greater percentages). Also, numbers ought not be patentable. Say even a 2MB number which may or may not be prime, but whose binary representation just might happen to match a Linux elf executeable file for the Macintosh-G4-powerpc architecture that has a standard debian operating system and libraries on it. That program is just a number; it's a very loooooooong binary number. But integers are just an element of mathematics. Again, I agree with you. But the devil's advocate made me say it!
The problem with that is that everything can be seen as mathematics. The operation of any machine or process is really just evaluation of quantum mechanical wave equations. So mathematics IN ANY FORM includes physical reality itself.
Business method patents would still be fine, though, due to the disconnect between economics and reality.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Only a decade or two of rampant "intellectual property" abuse, and impotent raging about it on Slashdot.
Everything's patented, usually several times over. It doesn't matter if it's open source; open source only provides you with rights that the original author had the authority to license; a third-party patent doesn't fit into that category.
The earlier patent Rackspace fought off patented the steps of loading a floating point value into a register, rounding it, performing an operation on it, and storing it back into memory. Even aside from being unpatentable subject matter, it's been done billions of times before (rounding before or after; both have been done); it's both obvious and non-novel. But the USPTO accepted it, so some troll had something to sue over.