e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: patents

  • Software Patent Wars: Is Linux next?

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic inc. and contributor to Intellectual Property Magazine.

    It was sunny day, 76 degrees, in Tyler, Texas on April 15th, 2011 when the jury foreman handed the single page decision to Judge Davis, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas [EDTX]. There were three questions and the jury’s answers. Did Google infringe Bedrock’s two patents? Yes. Were the patents invalid? No. How much did the jury award in damages? The jury “ordered Google to pay $5 million in damages for infringing a Linux-related patent held by Texas-based Bedrock Computer Technologies.”

    Bedrock Computer Technologies is a non-practicing entity, sometimes called a patent troll, which seeks license revenue for patents in their portfolio.

    Amy Miller wrote in Corporate Counsel:

    Bedrock had sued Google in 2006, along with Yahoo, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL, alleging infringement of a Linux-related patent filed in January 1997. The patent describes “a method and apparatus for performing storage and retrieval,” and Bedrock said the companies had infringed it by using versions of the Linux operating system kernel on their servers. Bedrock has also asked for an injunction, but the court has not ruled on that yet.

    Because of its wide use of the Linux operating system, the key words are “Linux-related patent.”

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  • Tim Lee and EduPatents

    Correction: Thanks to Seb Schmoller for pointing out that the op ed piece is not, in fact, by Tim Berners Lee but by Timothy B. Lee. Very different guy. Nevertheless, the points made by…um…the other Tim Lee are no less valid than they would have been coming from The Man Himself.

    There’s a great op ed piece in the New York Times by Tim Berners Lee Timothy B. Lee on the impact of software patents, drawing on a 1991 quote from Bill Gates:

    Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

    He goes on to use the Verizon suit against Vonage as an example of why he believes Gates was right then and is wrong now:

    The Gates memo predicted that a large company would “patent some obvious thing,” and that’s exactly what Verizon has done. Two of its patents cover the concept of translating phone numbers into Internet addresses. It is virtually impossible to create a consumer-friendly Internet telephone product without doing that. So if Verizon prevails on appeal, it will probably be able to drive Vonage out of business. Consumers will suffer from fewer choices and higher prices, and future competitors will be reluctant to enter markets dominated by patents.

    There’s no mention of the education market in his editorial, but the inference is not a hard one to make regarding the dangers to our industry. This is a great piece to share with anyone in education who has questions about why people worry about edupatents.