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Rackspace sued for hosting GitHubRackspace sued for hosting GitHubPosted Sep 18, 2012 17:53 UTC (Tue) by bersl2 (subscriber, #34928)Parent article: Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub From the About page of PersonalWeb's site: PersonalWeb is a proud member of the East Texas community. We are now 14 employees strong and growing. We own 15 key pending and issued patents that are critical to the development of a wide range of established and emerging distributed computing based industries and fundamental for cloud computing, distributed search engine file systems, content addressable storage and social networks.In other words, they're very likely patent trolls. I think they have other litigation ongoing, too. This particular company, though, puts names and faces to their shameful acts, unlike the myriad of shell companies employed by other trolls. The next question I have, though, is, "What is the relationship between PersonalWeb and Level3?"
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Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:57 UTC (Tue) by samlh (subscriber, #56788) [Link]
From the filing, it appears they both own rights to the patents, and Level3 is contractually obligated to participate in the lawsuit.
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:02 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
They seem to have been busy...
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Yahoo! Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00658
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:07 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
This page has PDFs of the complaints of most of those cases and some others I missed: http://texaslawyer.typepad.com/texas_lawyer_blog/2012/09/...
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:15 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Wow, that is quite the list. They seem to have gone out of their way to create a natural coalition of the richest companies in the field, all with a common interest in stomping them flat. I wonder if this is going to be a SCO-style clown show?
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:25 UTC (Tue) by Doogie (guest, #59626) [Link]
I guess the only way anyone in their right mind could possible sue IBM for patent infringement is if they are a non practicing entity. Then again who knows, maybe IBM does have a patent somewhere covering the use of patents to sue other patent holders or something equally asinine.
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 20:03 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] Yep, IBM has indeed patented patent trolling too
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:33 UTC (Tue) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]
Oddly enough, they didn't... They left out EMC and all the other high-end de-dupe vendors. I'm left wondering if they've licensed the patents or simply have enough of their own related portfolios to defend in kind.
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 18, 2012 22:21 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
Never mind rich. These clowns have arrogance to claim they "invented" all this stuff right to the face of massive companies, some of which employ thousands of programmers. They are essentially saying that all those folks are stupid because they couldn't see their great "inventions" (which are most likely just trivial shit, like all the rest of the software patents).
Amazing...
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 19, 2012 6:37 UTC (Wed) by tle@holymonkey.com (guest, #47821) [Link]
Seems that the economies of scale apply also to litigation.
When a company initiates a dozen similar lawsuits, it seems that they hold a competitive advantage over any one of the the dozen defendants.
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 19, 2012 9:25 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] When a company initiates a dozen similar lawsuits, it seems that they hold a competitive advantage over any one of the the dozen defendants.But can't the defendants pool resources as well? I seem to recall this has happened in some high-profile patent lawsuits.
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 19, 2012 8:04 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Very good news!
IBM lawyers will destroy them, they should have sued Samsung instead..
Not just RackSpace... Posted Sep 19, 2012 10:15 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
How did they forget Oracle?
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 18, 2012 22:15 UTC (Tue) by aaron (subscriber, #282) [Link]
Interesting. So Kinetech went patent-trolling 14 months ago...
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/07/07/patent-holder-see... ...and 2 months later, did a reverse-merger with PersonalWeb, a company with a vaporware product and troll-worthy portfolio of its own. And they just happen to be located in the most troll-friendly district in the USA. http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/09/28/personalweb-melds...
"PersonalWeb’s first consumer product is set to be StudyPods, a social learning platform that enables students to connect, collaborate and share academic knowledge with each other at their own university or colleges worldwide, utilizing technology assets PersonalWeb acquired from natural language search engine developer Topodia."
"Patents included in the Truenames portfolio have already been licensed to numerous companies including Iron Mountain, Skype, Audible Magic and Limewire, and are co-owned in a defined field by Level 3 Communications."
Wonder why they waited almost exactly one year to go trolling?
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