Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict (The Register) [LWN.net]

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict (The Register)

Posted Apr 22, 2011 23:32 UTC (Fri) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
Parent article: Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict (The Register)

Wow. If I didn't know about the actual suit, after reading that entire patent I would be convinced that it was a hoax. It's as obvious as it sounds in the news summaries.

Maybe it is a hoax and it's some kind of performance art project. It's like we live in some techno-absurdist reality. If there's a judgment on this verdict, or it doesn't get reversed on appeal... geez.

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Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict (The Register)

Posted Apr 23, 2011 18:37 UTC (Sat) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link] (4 responses)

Make sure you read the entire patent in its TIFF form, not the HTML transcription, which is incomplete.

Also, this patent has been re-examined and a reexamination certificate issued on 2011-04-12. The last few TIFF images are the pages from the reexamination.

There are now other patents listed as well as more citations to documents and publications. The net effect was to amend the patent by modifying 4 of the original 8 claims and ADDING 4 MORE.

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict (The Register)

Posted Apr 24, 2011 5:37 UTC (Sun) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (3 responses)

Why does Firefox still not support TIFF natively after all these years? Chrome doesn't either, it appears.

I did read the written description, though, and presuming that it's not totally fubar'd from the original application, and presuming the patent office and trial court reasonably stuck to the rule (IIRC) that amended claims must fit within the scope of the written description, then it still seems painfully obvious to me, even by my skeptical, biased, anti-patent standards.

Reviewing the Patent

Posted Apr 24, 2011 18:52 UTC (Sun) by orcmid (guest, #74478) [Link] (1 responses)

IE 8 doesn't support TIFF either, but the free ActiveX plug-in that the Patent site mentions worked for me. Once I have copies on my machine, I can view them with any number of built-in utilities, of course.

The amended claims do fit. Also, the revision to claims 3 and 5 close a loophole in the wordings that would have had the claims apply to access to the same-hash list for any purpose whatever, rather than only "accessing the linked list of records to search for a target record."

Unless covered by some other patent, it would appear that having a separate process that scans buckets for the sole purpose of scavenging automatically-expired records is not covered, so long as it does not involve the "record search means" for finding a record by its key.

Reviewing the Patent

Posted Apr 24, 2011 20:06 UTC (Sun) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]

I didn't mean to imply that I thought the USPTO got this wrong according to their examination process. I didn't mean "obvious" in a legal sense, as in an articulable relation to identifiable prior art. I was speaking more in lay terms, as in this is yet another fscking absurd result of allowing patents on software.

I'm not very adept at analyzing patent claims; e.g. means-plus-function and anticipation, both of which I would guess were fairly critical to this case.

TIFF

Posted Apr 27, 2011 8:37 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

TIFF isn't a file format in the sense we're used to. In fact that was actually the point at the time. Dozens of vendors wanted a "standard" format but they refused to agree on anything (including even which corner of the image is the start of the image data, since all of the scanner vendors wanted to begin with whichever corner would mean least buffer RAM given their unique [probably patent-avoiding] scan order arrangements. So TIFF is a way to write metadata which enumerates all the decisions made in choosing the actual file format.

Thus there's little point trying to support "TIFF". libtiff tries but it works only for whatever TIFF formats were common enough in the wild at the time the version you have was written. Over the years there has been JPEG-encoded TIFF (early references to a 'JPEG file' are to any of the various incompatible ways to store JPEG data in a TIFF, and not to the simple JFIF standard file format eventually used today), and more recently there are numerous high-bit-per-channel TIFF variants for professional photography, most of them mutually unintelligible of course...