Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

[Posted September 18, 2012 by corbet]

Personalweb Technologies and Level 3 Communications have filed a lawsuit [PDF] against Rackspace, alleging that Rackspace's hosting of GitHub infringes upon a long list of software patents.

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Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:23 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Relocate GitHub to a free country?

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 19:32 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Well github as company appears to be in US also, so I guess if they move hosting, they will be sued instead. Of course, moving the entire company in the same time would really strong message that patents don't help economy...

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 19:38 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

If this trend continues at some point the only profitable way to start up a new software company will be to operate it anonymously as a Tor hidden service.

All this Imaginary Property rent-seeking does in the long term is drive new innovations into the darknet.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:32 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If this trend continues at some point the only profitable way to start up a new software company will be to operate it anonymously as a Tor hidden service.

It'll not work: you still need to somehow pay the salary and investors will probably not want to deal with an illegal company.

All this Imaginary Property rent-seeking does in the long term is drive new innovations into the darknet.

Not really. They will probably push software development to China where it'll be controlled (to some degree) by government, but since government (even Chineese government!) is easier to placate then patent trolls…

The solution (which couple of years ago sounded like a joke and year ago looked like far-fetched extrapolation) becomes more and more real as time goes on.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:36 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

It'll not work: you still need to somehow pay the salary and investors will probably not want to deal with an illegal company.

Proof by counterexample.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:44 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

We were able to determine that Silk Road indeed mostly caters to drug users (although other items are also available), that it consists of a relatively international community, and that a large number of sellers do not stay active on the site for very long.

What this has to with github or investors? Yes, dark market does exist and will exist. I doubt it'll be ever used for low-return things like software development: you need profits measued in thousand percents to make it worthwhile.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:52 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

The need for outside investment in the first place is inflated by artifical barriers to entry into the market.

As the barriers to entry increase the value proposition of using technology to bypass them also increases.

It starts with drugs because that's where the incentives are highest, but given enough time and opportunity the patent trolls and other rent seekers will make it profitable to move more businesses into the darknet as well.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:55 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

This isn't specific to the software industry - it's part of a larger trend in the overall economy.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 0:16 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

As I've said: black market always existed and will always exist. It does not mean government will tolerate it. Well, some governments do, but they don't last long.

The problem with so-called “System D” is that it's much, much, much less efficient other approaches. In a world where software must be developed in a darknet not a lot of software will be produced. Take the article you are linking to. "Lagos is a city for hustling," he told me. "If you have an idea and you are serious and willing to work, you can make money here. I believe the future is bright." Wow. The power of “System D”! The world where people steal from legal oil-based economy, waste 90% of resources in the process and still have something to live with. The only problem: all that works only where there are normal economy to plunder.

If you want to look on the final of the “System D” triumph then take a look on Baltic states. As long as they had the ability to pillage transit they showed excellent promises. When the "legal economy" contracted “System D” went nowhere as well.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:05 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

There are plenty of places outside the US other than China which have more sensible patent laws. A server hosting company is one of the last kinds of operation which can relocate or go anonymous on Tor due to bandwidth and latency issues, so a much more probable solution if Rackspace don't want to fight the lawsuit is for Github to be hosted in Europe by a hosting company with no US office.

There have been some crazy and highly offensive extraterritoriality in the reach of US law recently, but I really don't see the US cutting connections to those who don't respect US patents in the same manner as has more reasonably occurred in respect of online gambling sites, and if they do that in respect of ignored patents then people outside the US will increasingly ignore the US market as irrelevant to our interests.

Frankly looking at it from this side of the pond, the only relevant question here is how much unemployment and lost business the US wants before the US population force their representatives to clean up patent law as affects software.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 22:34 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

There are plenty of places outside the US other than China which have more sensible patent laws.

"Sensible patent laws" is just one ingredient. Another one is "large domestic market". Thus China is the primary candidate: other countries are just not big enough.

Why is it important to have large domestic market? Easy: in this case you can develop all the patent-encumbered technologies you want without thinking about patents at all till you are big enough and is ready to go and kill your US competitors. Otherwise US trolls just squeeze your customers instead of you.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 11:18 UTC (Wed) by carlopiana (guest, #85127) [Link]

In this Europe is a little bit on a more service providers friendly area, since nobody in their mind would have sued the company hosting a third party's service for what the third party offers. Not because Europe has in theory a legislation against software patents (and I believe it's quite difficult to argue that source code is not "software as such"), but because we have an express liability exclusion for service providers, interpreted quite strictly by the European Courts.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 13:07 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Thanks for Imaginary Property. It was new to me.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 14:21 UTC (Wed) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Oct 2, 2012 17:08 UTC (Tue) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

I've been calling it Intellectual Poverty myself.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 17:03 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> If this trend continues at some point the only profitable way to start up a new software company will be to operate it anonymously as a Tor hidden service.

No.

> All this Imaginary Property rent-seeking does in the long term is drive new innovations into the darknet.

What it actually means is that companies will re-locate out of the USA into countries that have less IP restrictions, continue to develop software, and then hire lawyers to represent them in the USA and file patents and sue the shit out of software companies still stupid enough to be based in the USA.

Since they are immune from USA laws themselves, since they are not doing business in the USA, then USA software companies with patent portfolios will be forced to into unfavorable cross licensing agreements. Once that happens then foreign software companies will be able to start to legally do business in the USA.

There already going on and it's been going on for a while. It's going to get worse and worse.

The USA is pushing IP laws through international treaties to try to cut off countries that don't honor the IP laws. But this is not going to last long once other country's government's start to realize how much of a huge competitive advantage their corporations will have over USA corporations by ignoring IP BS. IP laws are a huge drag on innovation and USA regulations cause a massive overhead on any corporation operating in the USA. If companies can avoid this then even small companies can leapfrog around much larger and much richer competitors.

Unfortunately this also means that USA government will become much more violent and aggressive in forcing compliance. We don't have 737 military bases spread across the world in most major countries and all major regions for no reason.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 13:12 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

I wonder, which country can be considered free. Not Germany anymore, with judges like Dr. Peter Guntz:

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/09/german-court-hands-app...

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/02/apple-wins-german-inju...

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 21, 2012 10:06 UTC (Fri) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]

Well, and now Guntz judged that Motorola violates a Microsoft patent related to input devices (touch screen keyboard).

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:29 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Time to search for prior art. I think most if not all of those patents could and should be invalidated on that basis.

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:33 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Following up on myself: The '662 patent talks about using hashes to deduplicate data and was filed in December 2003. Monotone was first released in April 2003 and I'm pretty sure it used SHA1 to identify data.

The '662 patent talks about data deduplication, but surely if git infringes then so would Monotone have, and if Monotone does not then surely git does not?

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:41 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Plan 9 used this approach in 90-s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 19, 2012 0:17 UTC (Wed) by rknight (subscriber, #26792) [Link]

If that's all the '662 patent is about is using hashes to deduplicate data then it should be invalid. I know I used this approach with MD5 as far back as October of 2001, and it was suggested by a co-worker who claimed to have done something similar 5 years prior.

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 19, 2012 3:24 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

"Fossil" fileserver on top of "venti" filesystem did this in Plan9 in 1993. And the idea itself is even more ancient.

Time to search for prior art

Posted Sep 27, 2012 12:26 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

The idea was sufficiently well known for Val Henson (now Val Aurora) to publish a paper arguing against it in May 2003; she cites 6 different earlier systems using it: http://valerieaurora.org/review/hash/node2.html

The oldest appears to be rsync, with Tridge's thesis coming out in 1999, and for de-duplication specifically I'd check the paper on a backup system called "Pastiche" that was formally published in 2002...

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:29 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

It looks like the patents seem to cover functionality in Git itself. A patent on using a hash to identify a content item? Ridiculous.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:37 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

(disgusted noises)

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:53 UTC (Tue) by bersl2 (guest, #34928) [Link]

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?"

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
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Apple Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00660
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. International Business Machines Corporation filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00661
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Facebook Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00662
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Microsoft Corporation filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00663

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 (guest, #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?

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 17:55 UTC (Tue) by salvarsan (guest, #18257) [Link]

It is my considered opinion that it is past time to spread rumors that:
patent trolls want to confiscate guns and give them to Muslims, and
plan to copyright the Bible so as to collect royalties.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 1:47 UTC (Wed) by waucka (subscriber, #63097) [Link]

Don't forget rumors about patent trolls burning unlicensed copies of the Koran!

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 11:47 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Ack.

Then we have the fanatical christians and republicans sueing them and harassing them while the fanatical muslims try to kill them, all in an effort to restore the dignity of their prophets or gods or protect their children or whatever. Gotta be fun to watch.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 17:33 UTC (Wed) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

This isn't Slashdot. None of: christians, republicans, muslims, the Bible, the Koran, prophets, gods, or children are mentioned in the article. Please keep your remarks topical.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 25, 2012 15:54 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

He's referring to salvarsan's comment above. And the general craziness of zealots of various hues is quite topical at the moment :-). The Patent trolls certainly deserve retribution more than most.

One has to wonder how long this sort of patent nonsense will go on before the system finally gets improved. Those of us with clue have been telling everyone how wrong-headed it is (because it's completely obvious to us) for years now, and change is glacial. And meanwhile a lot of money is made by bad people, and a lot of innovation is held back.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:05 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Is it usual to sue the hosting provider rather than the company whose product infringes on a patent?

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 18:14 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

It is usual to sue whoever you think has the most money.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 10:30 UTC (Wed) by giggls (subscriber, #48434) [Link]

IMO this is a typical "only possible in the US" thing.

Why would one be able to sue a provider for (possible) illegal actions of its customer?

For me this sounds like suing US postal service for delivering suspected letter bombs.

Sven

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:19 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

> For me this sounds like suing US postal service for delivering suspected letter bombs.

I'm sure you could try that, and if you had a good lawyer and it were e.g. FedEx and not the real USPS you'd have a chance of getting some kind of settlement.

The legal system in the USA is screwed up )-:

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:50 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Not, unfortunately this is not US-only. Ever been to Germany and wonder why there's almost no free WiFi anywhere, at least not without some registration? It's because while providers cannot be held responsible for what their users do, it's unclear who may be considered a provider in this regard. Courts have judged either way.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:12 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

My guess is that github doesn't have offices in the federal patent troll circuit district so targetting rackspace is as much about venue shopping as it is about deeper pockets.

Following the initial logic of this suit, L3 should be suing themselves for carrying traffic to/from github.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 18, 2012 21:49 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

i am nearly ready to say that working within the system is no longer viable

maybe it is time for hacker culture to pack its bags and move somewhere else, and the USA can figure out how to create jobs on assembly lines instead

saving that, maybe it really is time to create a data haven. a place with so much of everyone else's data in it that the rest of the world is afraid to touch it.

sensible measures aren't working any more

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 3:54 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

The other, saner, cheaper option is for hackers to just stop thinking that email and Twitter matter and to actually _march_ on Congress to make a point about how completely fed up we are with this crap.

The current median age of a US congressman is ~63 years. They are not technical whizzes for the most part. Heck, you're hard pressed to find a UNIX hacker that age, given that UNIX itself is only ~40 years old, so only the very original UNIX developers were around when our politicians were taking their first steps into the world of professional law making.

Point being, Internet petitions don't freaking matter to Congress. In-your-face people matter. So long as people sit at home whining on the Internet, nothing is likely to change in D.C.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 9:11 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (guest, #3803) [Link]

Yeah, they do need to be pushed more on this.

What gets me is why they don't consider this an *emergency*. Consider all the bullcrap Congress rammed down our throats immediately after 9/11 because it was "needed for homeland security."

Major reform here is needed to protect business in America and we really do need it NOW.

They need to get their priorities right and understand that.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:22 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

> Major reform here is needed to protect business in America and we really do need it NOW.
Patent trolls are businesses, too. Congresspersons will not see much difference between a patent troll making 500 million USD a year by suing successful companies and a company making 500 million USD a year by making a useful product. To the politician these things are equal (unless one of the two contributes to a campaign).

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 21:51 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Almost all elected politicians are lawyers. So are almost all patent trolls.

There is such a thing called 'professional courtesy'.

Unfortunately for the rest of us when it's lawyers in charge of everything things don't tend to work out very well for non-lawyers.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 22:38 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> Almost all elected politicians are bad people. So are almost all patent trolls.
> There is such a thing called 'professional courtesy'.
> Unfortunately for the rest of us when it's bad people in charge of everything things don't tend to work out very well for non-bad people.

There, FTFY 8-) Being educated doesn't make one a bad person.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 20, 2012 7:13 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

> The current median age of a US congressman is ~63 years.

Sounds like Politburo in the pre-collapse USSR.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 21, 2012 10:14 UTC (Fri) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]

Yes, and the US will collapse as well.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 21, 2012 15:27 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-CON...

Annoyingly they don't have a total average, but it looks like under 58.

(Could we check and cite numbers before repeating them, please?)

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 19, 2012 8:02 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

> i am nearly ready to say that working within the system is no longer
> viable

I don't know. I largely ignore software patents, because they're all illegally granted anyway. Which brings me to the second point:

Why hasn't anyone sued for a software-patent infringement gone for the heart? Which is, that EVERY patent law on earth forbids patents a) software and b) mathematics (which software also is).

I know there are completely bogus rulings on this, for a) namely in re Appalat http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4571960268239... and in re Prater http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2299319819326... but this doesn't mean it's impossible to get another court to realize that they have no basis in reality. The same with the completely hare-brained interpretation of "algorithm", where courts also maintain a view which has no basis in reality (something like ruling that the value of Pi is exactly 3).

But nobody has yet gone for that and argued that these patents ALL must be invalid because a) putting software on a computer does not make that computer a new device and b) software is math.

I mean, it's not like that would be your only defence (usually it's: you're suing in the wrong place, you made procedural errors, we do not infringe, the patent is invalid anyway -- everything you can heap on it). So you could easily add this.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Posted Sep 20, 2012 15:05 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link]

http://patents.stackexchange.com/ was just announced and might help.