What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

Posted Jul 15, 2008 19:08 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

It would be interesting to see how much it cost to pay the troll, or to do all the legal work
for getting the prior art in the format that the PTO requires it to be for it to be
'considered'. You can't just give them news articles and papers or code.. you have to vet it,
get depositions, put in the legal framework, yada yada yada (its the reason that patent
lawyers charge quite a bit per hour.). 

I wonder if you have to pay challenge fees (well if I was the PTO and trying to get my piece
of the pie off of this racket.. I would definately make sure there were fees).

What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

Posted Jul 15, 2008 20:00 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] (3 responses)

A guess:

Firestar agreed to do this Red Hat deal because they knew Sun was in the process of
invalidating their lame patent(s) and decided to grab some cash before Sun's work became
public.  So, now they get to use Red Hat's money to try to get their patent re-instated.

Why else would you give such liberal terms (unless it was quite a bit of money)?

What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

Posted Jul 15, 2008 20:18 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

Well Sun most likely invalidated one patent, while Red Hat got a suite of patents (Firestar
and similar companies buy up patents in the cubic truck-load). Getting all of the patents
invalidated would be very costly and prone to failure (most patents even with lots of prior
art get kept :(. ) ... which is how the patent protection mechanism works.

What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

Posted Jul 16, 2008 16:43 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

But having a high profile story in the media of one of your patents getting slapped down has
got to lower the value of the whole portfolio.

What Red Hat and Firestar agreed to

Posted Jul 16, 2008 6:42 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

<i>Why else would you give such liberal terms...?</i>
As Red Hat pointed out when they first announced this, GPL gives them a nice negotiating stick
for this sort of thing. RH sits down at the negotiating table and says 'either go away, give
us these very liberal terms, or fight us to the death, since less liberal terms mean we have
to shut down our business.' If the troll does not want to fight to the death and does not want
to go away, they have to settle for these terms. Unusual, admittedly, but the only option RH
has and hence the only option an anti-RH troll has.