LWN: Comments on "Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub"

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Rudd-O — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:08:17 +0000

I've been calling it Intellectual Poverty myself.

Time to search for prior art

njs — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 12:26:22 +0000

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

wookey — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:54:23 +0000

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

bfields — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:27:12 +0000

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

juliank — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:14:07 +0000

Yes, and the US will collapse as well.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

juliank — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:06:58 +0000

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

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

pj — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:05:30 +0000

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

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

deepfire — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:13:38 +0000

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

Sounds like Politburo in the pre-collapse USSR.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

raven667 — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:38:50 +0000

> 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

khim — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:34:15 +0000

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

drag — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:51:19 +0000

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

tbird20d — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:33:11 +0000

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

drag — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:03:59 +0000

> 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

jackb — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:21:45 +0000

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

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

debacle — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:12:07 +0000

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

debacle — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:07:58 +0000

Thanks for Imaginary Property. It was new to me.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

niner — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:50:53 +0000

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

sorpigal — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:22:44 +0000

> 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

sorpigal — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:19:36 +0000

> 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

copsewood — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:05:19 +0000

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

jospoortvliet — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:47:52 +0000

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

carlopiana — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:18:02 +0000

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

giggls — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:30:18 +0000

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

Not just RackSpace...

nye — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:15:16 +0000

How did they forget Oracle?

Not just RackSpace...

eru — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:25:29 +0000

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.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

yodermk — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:11:03 +0000

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.

Not just RackSpace...

renox — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:04:28 +0000

Very good news!
IBM lawyers will destroy them, they should have sued Samsung instead..

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

Seegras — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:02:09 +0000

> 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.

Not just RackSpace...

tle@holymonkey.com — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:37:46 +0000

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.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

elanthis — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 03:54:13 +0000

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.

Time to search for prior art

Cyberax — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 03:24:06 +0000

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

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

waucka — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:47:30 +0000

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

Time to search for prior art

rknight — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:17:17 +0000

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.

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

khim — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:16:18 +0000

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.

Not just RackSpace...

bojan — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:21:29 +0000

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...

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

aaron — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:15:20 +0000

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

jackb — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:55:29 +0000

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

Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub

jackb — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:52:15 +0000

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

b7j0c — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:49:35 +0000

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

khim — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:44:21 +0000

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.