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Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat
One cannot help but wonder if Novell's executives aren't having second
thoughts about that company's recent deal with Microsoft. Since the
announcement, there has been quite a bit of hostile commentary in the
community, and there are signs of increasing levels of unhappiness within
the ranks of Novell's free software developers. The increase in Novell's
stock price turned out to be short-lived. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
has used this deal as his excuse to embark on a FUD campaign which brings
back memories of Darl McBride's heyday.
For an example, consider this widely-distributed bit of fun:
And we agreed on a, we call it an IP bridge, essentially an
arrangement under which they pay us some money for the right to
tell the customer that anybody who uses Suse Linux is appropriately
covered. There will be no patent issues. They've appropriately
compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property, which is
important to us. In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux
in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet
liability, because it's not just Microsoft patents. Because of the
way open-source works, there's nobody who's been able to do patent
coverage or patent indemnification behind that.
Mr. Ballmer is clearly claiming that Linux infringes upon Microsoft's patents, and that Linux users owe money to Microsoft. Novell is fairly clearly seen as having agreed with and validated that claim - otherwise, what, exactly, is Novell paying for? In an attempt to change that perception, Novell has sent out an open letter to the community, saying:
Since our announcement, some parties have spoken about this patent
agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not
share. We strongly challenge those statements here.
We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents. Microsoft has responded with a letter of its own. It seems that, perhaps, Novell got a slightly different deal than it was expecting at the outset. Presumably Novell's management is smart enough to understand that, if it throws away its community goodwill and runs into problems with the GPL, Novell's Linux business will have a dark future. Presumably, Novell's managers did not want to see their company be the enabler for a new flood of anti-Linux FUD and attempts to divide the community. Seemingly, however, those managers did not think through the consequences of signing this non-license with Microsoft. Thus the open letter and the IRC meeting about the deal, scheduled for November 27. Microsoft's claims have been met with a "show us the patents" response in parts of the community. Novell's open letter, which refuses to acknowledge the existence of patent issues, is a very similar sort of response. This approach worked well in the SCO case, for a simple reason: there was no substance to that company's wild claims. It is natural to think that the same sort of challenge will work this time around, but that thinking may be a mistake. The SCO case was, at least in certain phases, based on copyright. Avoidance of copyright problems is relatively easy for a free software project; all that is required is to not accept code of uncertain origin. Truly original work cannot have copyright issues. Microsoft, however, is talking about patents. Anybody who thinks that Microsoft holds no patents which can be applied to Linux has, perhaps, failed to understand the scope of the software patent problem. There is no clear way for a free software project to avoid software patent issues - at least, in parts of the world where such patents are recognized. An incredible number of patents have been issued covering trivial techniques. One of your editor's favorites is #6,732,359, the primary claim of which is:
A computer system having a memory, an operating system, a computer
application instantiated in a work space in the memory as managed
by the operating system, the application including a plurality of
application processes running in the work space, and an application
monitor monitoring whether each of the plurality of application
processes is in fact running and automatically attempting to remedy
an occurrence where any of the plurality of application processes
is not in fact running.
This ground-breaking, innovative work was patented in 2004; presumably, nobody ever thought of such a technique before 1999, when the patent was originally filed. In the real world, anybody trying to enforce a patent like this would be immediately buried in prior art. But there is little comfort to be found there. Even a relatively large company like Novell can only afford to defend so many patent suits, and there are a lot of patents like this one out there. Even if Microsoft does not currently own any patents which could be applied to Linux, there is no doubt that it could acquire some without great difficulty. Unlike SCO's claims, the patent problem is real, whether Novell publicly acknowledges it or not. If Microsoft had wanted to mount a patent attack against Linux, it could have easily done so by now. There's plenty of reasons which may explain why this has not happened so far. The fact that software patents are not recognized worldwide could well be part of the equation; that is why continued resistance to their imposition in Europe is so important. An attack against Linux certainly would not help Microsoft's position with antitrust authorities. Chances are that almost any company which is buying Linux support services is also a Microsoft customer, and Microsoft might just be smart enough to want to avoid upsetting its own customers. A legal campaign against Linux might well bring together a fearsome coalition of large companies with an interest in defending Linux and blood in its eyes. There is also the simple fact that Microsoft has not, to date, acted much like a patent troll; it has, instead, spent more time on the defendant's side of the courtroom. None of this gives any sort of real assurance that Linux is safe from such attacks by Microsoft, certainly. One should never underestimate corporate unpredictability - or stupidity. But it does suggest that the risk of a patent attack has not really changed as a result of Novell's arrangement. That risk existed before, and it still does. And, as Mr. Ballmer pointed out, it's not just Microsoft's patents. When the patent attack comes, it will likely originate from a small litigation company which has no customers to offend and no assets to countersue for. Novell (and its customers) will be no safer than the rest of us when this attack happens. So one might, indeed wonder what Novell thought it was buying. The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that the net cash flow is very much in Novell's direction. Hundreds of millions of dollars can be hard to turn down. One can hope that this money ends up benefiting both Novell and the free software community that Novell depends on. At the moment, however, it looks like Novell has put itself into a bit of an uncomfortable position. (Log in to post comments)
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 4:09 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]
Software patents are very dangerous. I forgot where I read this, but it has been written that any non-trivial piece of software violates at least one patent. The way the U.S. patent system "works" is just horrible. If a company with a large patent portfolio wanted to they could have a field day with open source. Open source is even more vulnerable because of its openness.
Linux is dead. Thanks for playing.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 9:29 UTC (Wed) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I don't think it's all that bad.
The junk patents are easy to refute and all you'd really need to do is show up with prior art.
Some patents might cover stuff that's been independently developed in OSS, so there is no prior art, those are the annoying cases where you rewrite the software to not use the neat trick the patent forbids.
As far as I'm aware a patent troll wouldn't get any damages awared to them if they didn't try to solve the problem without the courts first.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 12:19 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] Evidence tells otherwise. Refuting these patents can be very expensive, especially if there are many included. The patent trolls sets a licensing fee just under the cost of taking it to court, then attacks another company. What are you to do?
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 14:57 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] 'All you need is prior art' And a great deal of money. Usually hundreds of thousands to get even the most egregious suit thrown out, but certainly tens of thousands even if done on the cheap. See the JRMI project for an example of what happens when the tech in a Free Software project is patented _after_ they published it, then the patent is used to sue them. This case shows criminal behaviour by the agressors, and outrageous copyright infringement as well as an attempted patent-leveraged hold-up, but still the bad guys are winning in court so far, and the project is spending serious money. If it isn't trivial to win in this case then imagine what it's like if the patent owners did actually do their own work in parallel with or before the Free Software project's.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 30, 2006 22:52 UTC (Thu) by aquasync (subscriber, #26654) [Link] Wow. I hadn't heard about this project.
Thats really disappointing to see how badly the courts are working.
I'm just amazed by this quote:
``In it, he doesn't argue that Katzer didn't copy the JMRI software in violation of the copyright terms, probably because even HE can't stretch the truth that far. Instead, he argues that copyright doesn't protect free and open source (FOSS) software! You can read the entire argument in the motion filed with the court, in particular the section named "Plaintiff has waived his ability to sue under the Copyright Act" starting on page 13. Basically, it says that since JMRI makes the software available on the web, free of charge (although not free of restriction), when someone like Katzer takes it and uses it in violation of those restrictions, we can sue him in contract law only, if at all. The shocking part of Katzer's argument is that he says we have no rights under either copyright or contract to enforce.''
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 14:09 UTC (Thu) by Liefting (subscriber, #8466) [Link] Even if some, or most of the patents are indeed junk and are easily (but expensively) refuted through prior art, I think that some of the Microsoft patents are really defendable. Microsoft *did* come up with original ideas, and that's what patents are supposed to protect.
One of the things that could conceivably be covered by a whole load of *legitimate* (not in the legal sense, but in the "honest" sense) MS patents would be Microsoft networking. Especially the combination of TCP/IP, NetBIOS, SMB, Active Directory, Kerberos and a few other things that all tied together in a specific way provide something called 'Single Signon' to all sorts of servers. There are some really clever ideas there which I doubt you'd be able to find prior art (working implementations) for.
The obvious piece of OSS software that would be impacted by this is Samba, but the smbfs filesystem is part of the Linux kernel as well. Easily ripped out though, but still...
MIT's project Athena Posted Nov 23, 2006 17:12 UTC (Thu) by scottt (subscriber, #5028) [Link] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena
MIT's project Athena, which the Kerberos authentication system originated from likely has prior art to all the functionality you listed.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 13:51 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] >it has been written that any non-trivial piece of software violates at least one patent. The way the U.S. patent system "works" is just horrible.
The whole situation smacks of great opportunity.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 21:48 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Having the source code viewable does not make free software more vulnerable than proprietary software. As you can see in the example shown in the article, problematic patents are not so detailed that someone would need source code to determine an infringement.
Indeed, free software is less vulnerable in some ways. For one example, anyone can remove a patented feature. With proprietary software, if a court rules that the software violates a patent, users of that software have to either continue using it and leave themselves vulnerable to patent litigation, or stop using the software completey.
With free software, anyone can publish a version of the software with the patented feature removed, so users have the third option of continuing to use the software but the patented feature removed - so they are not vulnerable.
Oh balderdash! Posted Nov 24, 2006 15:39 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] Be specific. Who would kill Linux, and how would they do it?
By suing over a patent? Name some hypothetical idiot who would sue, and name who they would sue. Explain how this could possibly kill Linux.
Would they sue Linus Torvalds?
Would they sue IBM? RedHat? You? Me?
Would you stop using Linux because someone else got sued? Would anyone else? Would businesses around the country suddenly stop using Linux?
Would the rest of the world even care if someone in the US sued somebody else in the US over Linux?
Unless you can provide even a hint of specificity, you are either panicing out of ignorance or Darl McBride.
Power of shame? Posted Nov 22, 2006 6:07 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] "I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end. [CEO Steve] Ballmer and [Chairman Bill] Gates have pride in the fact that their competition may have tried to crush them with legal wars, but they overcame. I think they would have a hard time using legal tactics. They would be ashamed." -- Linus Torvalds, 2004
Power of shame? Posted Nov 22, 2006 15:38 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] I think Linus is probably right. As long as MSFT can keep a dark intellectual property cloud hanging over Linux, it will slow it's adoption rate in larger companies and organizations. FUD is the MSFT way.
Power of shame? Posted Nov 22, 2006 23:29 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I'm not so sure, they tried to license the FAT long names trick, and failed.Microsoft introduced FAT in version 2.0 of MS-DOS in 1982, but was not granted patent '517 until 1996. Last year Redmond used it as the basis of its first ever licensing program, offering manufacturers the right to use the ubiquitous file system in return for a low royalty rate. At the time, Microsoft described this as "liberalization".They are trying.
Much dryer and it would've been the desert. Posted Nov 22, 2006 6:22 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Init? Is that you? Where have you been ol' buddy?
Much dryer and it would've been the desert. Posted Nov 22, 2006 6:24 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] (Or Apache, or any of a number of programs that manage a pool of tasks, lest you take my comment the wrong way.... Init just seems to be the first in so many ways--especially in PID.)
It's worse than that! Posted Nov 22, 2006 8:45 UTC (Wed) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link] Maybe I'm a bit more pessimistic, but it reads to me like Microsoft has patented the Dell server running Red Hat in my data center.
It's worse than that! Posted Nov 22, 2006 15:52 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Microsoft != BellSouth
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 7:58 UTC (Wed) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] I think it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft's products are just as much at risk of patent claims as free software projects are. Software patents threaten the whole industry.You might think that Microsoft has more money to defend itself, but that doesn't actually help its customers, and that's what this FUD is about—the "undisclosed liability" of having Windows in your server room.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 9:40 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] I would say that Microsoft has an increased risk of patent claims since they have more money to extort than the open source community, wich also has been proven in the court since MS as of yet have hade to defent itself on several occasions
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 15:43 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] I think it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft's products are just as much at risk of patent claims as free software projects are.Linux is more at risk simply because the source code can be examined by anyone. Someway may suspect that MSFT is violating a patent by observing the behavior of a program, but without examining the source code it's hard to prove.
Patents Don't Apply to Source Code Posted Nov 22, 2006 16:26 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] Patents apply to behavior, not source code. There's no reason source code would be necessary or even make it easier to prove patent infringement.
Patents Don't Apply to Source Code Posted Nov 22, 2006 16:51 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Not all behavior is exposed to the user. You won't tell a Linux kernel with RCU from the one without RCU except by comparing their performance.
Patents Don't Apply to Source Code Posted Nov 22, 2006 17:24 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] True, but then a propietary company has to tell everyone that they have RCU since they need to make a selling point ;-)
Patents Don't Apply to Source Code Posted Nov 22, 2006 20:54 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Patents apply to behavior, not source code.Patents apply to the use of concepts or ideas. As noted by others, this may or may not be apparent without seeing the source code.
Patents Don't Apply to Source Code Posted Nov 30, 2006 18:45 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] Patents apply to behavior, not concepts or ideas. Clever lawyers have succeeded with patent applications for increasingly abstract things, but the patents still apply only to some process that implements an idea and not the idea itself.
Microsoft and other vendors of proprietary software are regularly found guilty of patent infringement without the benefit of source code. RCU is mentioned above, but this is by definition a behavior that can be observed.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 9:51 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link] Yeah. It's a funny thing. Microsoft obviously has more risk of a lawsuit from Novell than the other way around and that's why the cash went from Microsoft to Novell. If Novell was going to agree to not sue Microsoft in exchange for a huge pile of cash, it kinda makes sense that Microsoft would also agree not to sue Novell...
But the way it played out wasn't brilliant.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 11:35 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] If you measure the money given as a percentage of revenue, profit, or cash on hand, it becomes a little less clear who is really giving more. (Hint: MS's annual revenue is about 40x Novell's, profits about 50x and assets about 25x. And MS's payment to Novell about 4x the money going the other way. Make your own assessments about relative importance.)
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 27, 2006 5:25 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Novell's patents probably are confined to the server space, since Novell doesn't have much of a client-side play that they originated themselves. How about we restate this as server revenue vs. server revenue? The bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from the client side.
Just a thought.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 10:27 UTC (Wed) by jiri.hlusi (guest, #34016) [Link] I'm not quite an expert in [any] law matters, but isn't it so that in order to cause patent infingement, author [of a software] must also be making profit on the work created (among other conditions)?
I mean, plain writing a software as an act of creativity can hardly be punnished under any law, correct?
Could the case be then that if a patent war breaks out, companies who today sell compiled versions of OSS + services around it (say RedHat as an example), put even less accent on making money in "box business", and focus even more on services? It might change the software business, but at the same time shoud not kill the software as such.
Well, complicated world in any case. Not trying to hide that...
-- Jiri
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 10:37 UTC (Wed) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link] I'm not quite an expert in [any] law matters, but isn't it so that in order to cause patent infingement, author [of a software] must also be making profit on the work created (among other conditions)? No. Microsoft was sued over Internet Explorer and lost (and had to pay a considerable sum of money), even though MS had never sold IE. I mean, plain writing a software as an act of creativity can hardly be pu[n]ished under any law, correct? No, plain creativity can be illegal. It's even illegal if I write the software for my own use and never distribute it. This is one reason why software patents are so stupid -- they are essentially a type of "thought crime". Rich.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 1:59 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] No, plain creativity can be illegal. It's even illegal if I write the software for my own use and never distribute it. This is one reason why software patents are so stupid -- they are essentially a type of "thought crime". That's really overstating it. The thought doesn't infringe. The creativity doesn't. You can invent something someone else did and not go to jail or owe anyone anything. You just can't use it. And that's obviously required by practicality. There's no way to tell if someone got an idea from a publication by someone else or dreamed it up himself. So if an inventor is going to get paid at all for disclosing his invention, the law has to assume that anyone who uses an invention after it was disclosed got it via the disclosure. (That doesn't seem to explain why it's an infringement if you independently invent something after the patentee invented it but before the patentee disclosed it, though. I don't know what the rationale for that is).
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 14:28 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] The details of exactly what constitutes patent infringement varies by country, but yes, simply using software is often an infringement - i.e. end users can be targeted as well as authors. The rules are different between the US and the UK, for example. This is the best spec I could find for what the actual law is in various places: http://www.answers.com/topic/patent-infringement-2#after_ad1 There is also 'contributory infringement' which is where you supply a part of a patented thing in another country, in an attempt to work round the rules. This is supposed to deal with making parts in the US then shipping them somewhere else where the patent doesn't apply for assembly, but has recently been applied to microsoft 'assembling' all its copies of Windows at a plant in Ireland. Essentially no-one is safe, although end-users don't have too much to fear due to having little money, and sueing them being very bad publicity (see music industry) - which is why it is very easy for end users, but very hard for distributors, to install assorted media codecs, despite/due to the innumerable patent infringements in them.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 15:02 UTC (Wed) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > The rules are different between the US and the UK, for example.
Not least because the UK shares with the rest of Europe a position that software patents are invalid and thus unenforceable... at the moment, this is not a worldwide problem, and people like Ciaran O'Riordan and Florian Müller are trying hard to keep it that way.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 16:13 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] People say this categorically too often. It is nothing like that clear-cut.There are plenty of software patents issued in the UK - like the JMRI model railway control patent, a classic from ARM Corp about changing pointers instead of copying data to speed up emulation (nobody ever did that before 2003 right?), microsoft clipboard format, etc. There are also software patents that have been successfully litigated in the UK. The most famous is probably the 'pupil management data trasnmitted over a wireless network' one that the government had to 'buy off' in the end to let people implement wireless networks in UK schools. The recent Aerotel patent that was considered in the court of appeal was granted. It was granted because the judge thought it was a hardware patent because he was told so - but if you read it, you will see they added nothing but a bit of software to an existing telphone exchange in order to do billing in a particular way. Smells like a software patent to me, not a 'new network' as the judge described it. The situation in the UK (and Europe generally) is better than the US because business method patents really are being resisted, but software patents are being granted and enforced right now. We are trying to hold the tide back, with some success, but saying 'software patents are unenforceable in Europe' is wrong and complacent. The EPLA plan is gaining momentum and _sounds_ reasonable to the inexpert, so will be hard to resist. It is equivalent to creating the US central Patent Court that made 'everything' patentable there in practice. I see no reason why things shoudln't go exactly the same way here over the next 10 years unless a _lot_ of people complain.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 19:25 UTC (Wed) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > There are plenty of software patents issued in the UK
I am aware of this, and there are even more issued by the EU patents office - which is why I talked in terms of validity, not of issue. Nobody is claiming that invalid patents are never issued; they shouldn't be, sure, but the patent issuers are only human. An invalid patent can't be relied upon in court, though, and that's what matters - the ability to say "try it" to someone waving a software patent in the sure knowledge that it would get kicked out of court.
> There are also software patents that have been successfully litigated in the UK. The most famous is probably the 'pupil management data trasnmitted over a wireless network' one...
...that the account you link to describes as having *failed* in litigation; the DfES substantially won in 2004, and pretty much let Bromcom's new owners settle with them after the patent directive was rejected (destroying any hope of Bromcom actually winning anywhere). Backing up your case with evidence that contradicts it doesn't strengthen it as much as you'd hope, you know...
> The recent Aerotel patent that was considered in the court of appeal was granted. It was granted because the judge thought it was a hardware patent because he was told so...
...and therefore he *explicitly rejected* the idea that patents would be extended to software. That, again, sounds like a reaffirmation of the existing situation to me; presumably if somewhere presented a software-only solution, the same judge would have found that either the patent was invalid after all or a software-only solution couldn't infringe the patent by definition (because it's a hardware patent).
> software patents are being granted and enforced right now
Being granted, maybe. Can you point to *anything* in UK law that's an unequivocal "enforcement" of a patent that both sides acknowledge to be software-only? ...Somehow I doubt it. After all, if you could, such a case would serve as a precedent for the general enforceability of software patents (which the Aerotel case explicitly contradicts), and would surely have been such a landmark case in patent law that the Aerotel judgement would necessarily have referred to it.
I'm not saying that it's OK to be complacent, and I respect your efforts to hold back the tide; and nor would I disagree about the dangers of the EPLA - but I do disagree that the situation is as equivocal as you're painting it, and I do so because on the evidence that *you* present, UK courts are holding fast in their refusal to extend patentability to software. The case against software patents needs to be made to the politicians, not the judges. Moreover, perhaps I'm not the person on whose back you should be jumping up and down - the soldier who shoots his allies first soon ends up fighting alone.
Using patents Posted Nov 22, 2006 23:23 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The US situation really sucks -- I was under the impression that "use" of a patent was not infringement, and therefore end users were safe; I was writing a rant to complain about the parent comment, but the US code seems to say otherwise.Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.I hope it is different in the EU.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 10:47 UTC (Wed) by mitchskin (subscriber, #32405) [Link] In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability, because it's not just Microsoft patents.The "undisclosed balance sheet liability" thing is aimed right at CEOs and CFOs, who (since Sarbanes-Oxley) have to personally certify their company's financial reports. Pretty scary FUD.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 17:07 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] Given the current state of software patents (as several of the above posters have pointed out), anybody who has _any_ software in their data center today has that same "undisclosed balance sheet liability", because it's not just Microsoft's patents.
(I was going to say "any software less than 20 years old" because any older patents have expired -- but the silliness of today's patent situation has allowed for patents to be issued on concepts that have been floating around since the early days of OS/360, Multics, etc., and the courts don't seem readily disposed to summarily dismissing a patent suit against software that was around before the patent was filed. Strange world when a patent holder can sue prior art for infringing.)
With the SOX liability this may encourage outsourcing all one's datacenter operations to managed services companies; redirect the patent trolls to the likes of IBM, HP, et al.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 22, 2006 20:32 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] Definition for a "patent" in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's "Devil'sDictionary" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Dictionary)... Patent: A legalized robbery which allows a group of lawyers to extort protection money from the customer against other people using the same ideas. Regardless whether the customer is an innovator or not. What elevates this protection racket above others is that: - This "innovation" "protection" is expounded as absolutely necessary by all kinds of commercial institutes - The "protection" is granted for about everything, so that it's impossible not to require "protection" in both directions - The documents about what these "protections" cover are written in "lawyerese" and to understand them you need a lawyer and sometimes a (very expensive) round in the courts too "Swindler's handbook" should have a whole example section on this scam...
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 0:12 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] Novell, for all the good intentions Im sure you had in this, witness the beast you have created - my blog post on this. Thanks for the great article.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 14:27 UTC (Thu) by JohnNilsson (guest, #41242) [Link] One way to do some damage control regarding the patent issue is to reward those who contest an invalid patent and punish the patent holder.
For example if an patent was contested in court. If the patent was found to be invalid the holder would be sentenced to pay punitive damages. This way there could be profit in contesting patents, and there would an economic incentive for the would be patent holder to avoid obviously invalid patents.
Novell, buyer's remorse, and the patent threat Posted Nov 23, 2006 18:02 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] This sounds like a really good idea. In extreme cases patent trolls might even find it profitable to try to invalidate patents.
Sigh.
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