How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters) [LWN.net]

Google was not the only company sued for patent infringement by Bedrock; there several other defendants, including Yahoo. Most of those defendants have settled, but Yahoo stuck it out to the end and got a "not infringing" verdict for its pain. Thomson Reuters looks at what happened differently this time to enable Yahoo to win. "First off, Bedrock had a stronger case against Google. [Bedrock counsel Douglas] Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial). Yahoo, on the other hand, used a different form of Linux, and its lead trial lawyer, Yar Chaikovsky and Fay Morisseau of McDermott Will, were able to argue that Yahoo never executed the Bedrock code."

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How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 12, 2011 23:51 UTC (Thu) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link] (1 responses)

Does "a different form of Linux" here mean "FreeBSD"?

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 0:07 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yahoo's majority of systems currently run a custom build of Linux based on RHEL afaik.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/yahoo-the-linux-com...

They have been migrating away from BSD for a long time.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 3:14 UTC (Fri) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it's weird that they don't pool their legal resources to fight Bedrock. It would be beneficial to all Linux users, which has the potential of infringing Bedrock's patents (regardless of whether software patens is valid or not).

Bedrock will come to other companies (especially which have deep pockets and no motivation in defending Linux), knocking their doors, dragging them to settle.

I have an idea, what about documenting the software patents infringement by FLOSS projects and start informing both sides.
To the users: "Hi, [patent holder name] can sue you because you use [software name]."
To the patent holders: "Hi, why don't you start suing [list of companies]? They infringe your patents by using [software name]."
Perhaps we can put an end to software patent threat by inciting a great software patents war.

The current atmosphere of FLOSS projects is already under FUD. I think individual user like me has nothing to afraid of but medium-to-large companies won't touch FLOSS unless if it's so big (like IBM) or small enough to stay under the radar or just don't care about software patents and take their chance.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 8:51 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Pooling probably wouldn't have worked here.

What Yahoo did only makes sense once you accept that these cases aren't being decided on the merits, and probably can't be.

Yahoo waited until Bedrock's case was presented against Google, then they presented their case in a way that forbade that approach. Bedrock can't change their position because even if both the old position and the new are equally "true" the inconsistency is enough to defeat the case.

Imagine you're defending a case in which it is claimed you used a prime number and the plaintiff owns prime numbers. In fact the number you used was 8193. Early on, expert #1 for the plaintiff happens to say "Primes are never even" and you let that go since although it's false, it doesn't help you. To your annoyance, you lose because apparently neither the judge nor jury can divide by 2731 and you are cut off by a procedural guillotine before you can suggest trying 3 instead.

Now the plaintiff moves on to their second case. In this case the defendant used the value 2, it's clearly prime, and they must surely settle, right? Nope. They open by saying "Two is an even number" and within hours they're victorious. Because expert #1 already told the court that primes aren't even. Challenging your own expert puts the judgement in your favour from the previous case at risk. The second defendant won because of the case you lost, even though their position was weaker.

Courts can't deliver justice when they don't understand the case, and one of the things software patents do is present huge numbers of cases that can't be understood properly except by software engineers, neither judge nor jury are software engineers and there is no time in the court's calendar to give them even introductory training. The equivalent problem also causes complex fraud cases to collapse, which is more serious since that's criminal court.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 7:07 UTC (Fri) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (9 responses)

"Bedrock's Linux code"? You mean they actually wrote it? Or is this just patent attorney doublespeak?

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 14:37 UTC (Fri) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link] (8 responses)

It's patent attorney doublespeak: claim "ownership" of the code in question, even if someone else wrote it without ever seeing the patent in question. It's all part of the "patent rights are legitimate property rights" mindset.

I think this: http://www.google.com/patents?id=X4QXAAAAEBAJ&printse... is the patent in question. The actual claims are at the end of the patent.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 17:04 UTC (Fri) by salvarsan (guest, #18257) [Link] (1 responses)

Re: patent 5893120

The claims are for a method of using of hash tables with linked lists
for hash collisions, and deletion of expired nodes (garbage collection).

Doctor Dobb's Journal published equivalent source in the late 80's.
How did Bedrock ever get a 1997 patent for that?!

What's next? Will they stripmine some fundamental algorithms from Knuth,
Sedgewick, et.al., string them together in a few object classes, and patent
the results?

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 17:20 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Sssh! There are patent trolls among us!

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 13, 2011 18:37 UTC (Fri) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (4 responses)

It's patent attorney doublespeak: claim "ownership" of the code in question

It's not their code then - someone else has the copyright on it. Patent infringement or no, if Bedrock copied and distributed the code in question in violation of the license, they would presumably be guilty of copyright violation and be subject to significant legal penalties. Claiming that it is "their code" is slander of title, and an outright fraud.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 14, 2011 0:55 UTC (Sat) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (3 responses)

Since there wouldn't be any actual damages (it's free!), nor any profit from which to make restitution, anyone who sued would have to elect for statutory damages.

The maximum for statutory damages is $30,000 ($150,000 for willful infringement), plus maybe attorney's fees. Statutory damages are per *work*, not per infringement. So I'm sure they'd be happy to cut a check for $30,000 from their $5,000,000.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 15, 2011 4:58 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (2 responses)

A while back I helped prove to a judge that Open Source developers do suffer real economic damage from license violations and can claim more than statutory damage. But the issue is probably moot in this case, when Bedrock says it's "their" code they are only talking about the patent.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 16, 2011 13:41 UTC (Mon) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (1 responses)

Bedrock doesn't own any "code" here though. They have a government granted monopoly on an algorithm. Claiming to own someone else's code is a fraud. If it were my code, I would be inclined to sue them for slander of title, especially since trivial changes are probably all that would be necessary to escape their patent dragnet.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 16, 2011 14:17 UTC (Mon) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]

> They have a government granted monopoly on an algorithm.

s/\./ and any implementations thereof./

HTH.

How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)

Posted May 16, 2011 11:25 UTC (Mon) by kevinm (guest, #69913) [Link]

It seems that even if this patent is held to be valid, it could easily be worked around. All you would have to do is mark the expired records for later deletion, rather than deleting them immediately - all the claims in the patent are explicitly for removing the expired records at the same time as searching the list.

Different form of Linux??

Posted May 14, 2011 9:51 UTC (Sat) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (2 responses)

I really wonder where is the infriging code??
Maybe it's in a kernel module which would explain the difference?
Or maybe Google's legal team wasn't very good but Yahoo's legal team was good..

Different form of Linux??

Posted May 16, 2011 17:05 UTC (Mon) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link] (1 responses)

https://lwn.net/Articles/440090/

Different form of Linux??

Posted May 16, 2011 19:34 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

Thanks for the reminder, but it is written in the summary "Chaikovsky and Fay Morisseau of McDermott Will, were able to argue that Yahoo never executed the Bedrock code."

But, how can Yahoo not use the 'routing cache' of the Linux kernel??
AFAIK it's used for all TCP/IP communications..