Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict A jury has found that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google has infringed a patent held by a small Texas-based company and must pay $5m in damages. In 2006, Bedrock Computer Technologies sued Google and several other outfits – including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL – claiming they infringed on a patent filed in …
Texas was chosen as the venue as aresult of its favourable treatment to the plaintiffs in such cases. The catch - at least one defendant has to be from Texas. The big boys - Google, RedHat etc are not. So how did the cases get standing? One defendant is from Texas - it is a one-man IT company that has been deunct for several years. If this case succeeds for the plaintiff, then it means retrospective guilt applies.
Hey, this signals the end for old-fashioned Linux! I'm rushing to switch over to Bedrock OS. If they have patents like this, I'm sure their software must be the very latest and best. Look out Microsoft!
Oh, what's that you say? Bedrock doesn't have an operating system? It doesn't even make any software at all? It's just a lawyer sitting in an office???
Well, that certainly is what the patent system was designed to accomplish.
when a ridiculous patent case is taken in a bought and paid for state where the chances of justice are low you waste no money on the case just appeal and appeal until the case has to move to somewhere where there is a chance of justice and the costs to the litigator are on a par with the 'damages' offered in the earlier cases.
Then Bedrock will go the way of SCO and with luck the mickey mouse legal arena's will find their source of revenue from these cases drying up.
Or maybe that last pint I had was just too good.
Reading the full patent - the only slightly possible patentable thing is the removing of 'expired' items 'on the fly'
The linked list to resolve hash collisions is well known - and the patent references prior art for this
There is nothing in the patent that defines what 'expired' is in this instance, and we can conceive of many methods to define expired so this is not the sole basis of the patent.
So the final and more likely grounds for the patent is 'on the fly' - which is simply that during the linked list iteration phase of a normal search the algorithm checks each node for whether it is expired - and removes it.
I have personally (in 20 years) not seen this 'on the fly' removal - I have seen explicit removal and garbage collection task, but I can not believe for a minute that this was profound, or new in 1996.
I am fairly confident prior art will be found and this Patent will be invalidated, well I bloody hope so!
@frank ly, what you don't understand is that patent trolls ALL file in east Texas, they COULD file somewhere else but then there would be a fair trial, which would usually have the numerous cases of prior art come up and invalidate their patents. The argument for bringing these cases into east Texas, instead of somewhere with fair judges, is that these companies do business in east Texas. If I started a business, I DEFINITELY would exclude this area from my business, forcing any patent trolls to do battle in a fair location.
...if in a few years Bedrock try to make a tablet or PMP that supports all common web video formats. I understand the WebM license will come back to bite them rather hard.
Fortunately for them they're just a bunch of trolls. Try searching for them. Only links I find are either to this court case or other litigation.
If you're a technology company doing well without having to sell in the US then please do not sell to them.
Selling anything in the US means paying bribes to the government-owning incumbents any time you do anything vaguelly clever.
Someone in the US needs to scrap the corrupt patent system and start allowing invention -- until then the rest of the world should keep out and let them fuck around trying to please their corporate masters.
It must be lawsuits like this one that convinced Google to try to buy up all of Nortel's patents, for "defensive purposes." Since Intellectual Ventures started suing, I now completely disbelieve the claims of any business entity that it is buying up patents for "defensive purposes only." However, even when it does inevitably start suing, Google will likely be able to evade the "patent troll" label (and thus take advantage of judicial preference for "practicing" entities over NPEs/PAEs), since it also engages in R&D. Clever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkQELhZeDYQ
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