Patent Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Do they use gmail or other google services? Banned Facebook? Banned
Obviously it's actually probably excitingly hard to maintain this list with an accuracy but it's an entertaining thought experiment.
Do you support and supply service to patent trolls and their lawyers who harm the community and may one day actually sue you?
The suggested strategy doesn't seem all that different from the Open Invention Network to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
I'm not a real student of this, but off the top of my head the techniques used in real asymmetric warfare include:
* Buying off the enemy (pallets of $100 bills to Afghanistan)
* Drone strikes (perhaps not quite yet feasible, although domestic drone usage is increasing and no doubt gives corporate legal teams hope)
* Win the hearts and minds of the locals (equivalent: raise awareness in the judiciary so they no longer give aid and comfort to trolls)
* Supply them with arms (have them do your bidding by harassing competitors in exchange for not harassing you further)
* Legalize it (stop drug cartels by taking the economic incentive away from their profit center--in this case, change law to strip away their incentives)
What else?
(And don't think Facebook or Google are any better than Apple or MS. They just don't have enough patents.)
Or, should you be able to call the police while you're being robbed if you sued as a victim of police brutality in the past?
The claims seem absurd, but that doesn't mean the plaintiff should be fought using any means possible including outside of court. It sets a terrible precedent, and would apply to plaintiffs you're more likely to agree with.
Really, even Samsung and Apple continue to do business with each other in the midst of suing eachother.
I for one would enjoy seeing a company refuse to ship goods to that entire wacky eastern Texas district that made such a nuisance of itself by supporting trolls.
(1) With obvious limitations on race religion etc.
With facial recognition and the like, it could even be taken down to the individual context and innumerable situations. Though I consider this a dangerous path to tread.
Such people may have large bank balances. But if "nobody" -- or at least, nobody they need and of above average competence -- will take their money, perhaps that would send a message. Or, sink them. Either way.
The message being, no matter how "rich" you are, you are part of and embedded in a larger community. No [one] is an island. Or, "don't sh-t where you..."
Hadoop is basically a clean room implementation of MapReduce and GFS anyway, to the point where Google graciously offered Apache a liberal patent license just to make sure Hadoop users didn't worry about Google coming after them when their patents came through on this stuff.
The initial white papers about Google Filesystem were presented in 2003: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=945450
Your right I didnt read there claims but when somebody says 3 and there working out is 1+1 then I'll look at the working out and not there conclusion. In this case its the patents.
As an example, let's take the first independent claim from the '662 patent:
" A storage system, comprising:
one or more memory sections, including one or more memory devices having storage locations for storing data, and a memory section controller capable of detecting faults in the memory section and transmitting a fault message in response to the detected faults; and one or more switches, including one or more interfaces for connecting to one or more external devices; and a switch fabric connected to one or more memory sections and the external device interfaces and interconnecting the memory sections and the external device interfaces based on an algorithm; and a management system capable of receiving fault messages from the memory section controllers and removing from service the memory section from which the fault message was received, and wherein the management system is further capable of determining an algorithm for use by a switch fabric in interconnecting the memory sections and the external device interfaces, and instructing the switch to execute the determined algorithm, wherein an interface of the switch is connected to a non-volatile storage device, and wherein the management system is further capable of instructing the non-volatile storage device to load data into one or more of the memory sections via the switch."
So... any HA system ever invented? Like the summary said. Great, thanks. Glad that you won a point on "you didn't read the claims!!!!1111" which are content-free garbage, like every other software patent.
Your right though that they do word these things so losely that my mother giving birth to me many years ago probably violated some routing patent and in that I agree fully with you in that it is just wrong.
Your both right :)
Though all of us agree trolls are bad in any form, and in that I look forward to these trolls getting educated at there own expence when they lose.
You mean "the most important part, by far."
Because "the claims" define what the patent actually covers.
Note that the claims can't be read in isolation. The words in the claims get their meaning from the specification. For example, a claim could use the word "lawnmower" to refer to what you and I would call a banana by defining "lawnmower" appropriately.
Just looking at the claims is better than nothing, but is still basically useless.
Yeah, a patentee can be his own lexicographer, but... I've never seen anything like this in practice, and I've read a lot of patents. Reading the claims in isolation generally gives you a pretty good idea of what the patent's about, once you get the hang of claim reading.
Step 1: It's election times soon so all politicians will normally be supportive to the one killer argument - patent trolls kill jobs in the US:
(a) start tracing where the money paid within these "successful extortions" goes to - I'm confident a line to drug fused parties with Brazilian hookers, private jets & yachts, endless squandering lifestyles of some of the beneficiaries or their children can easily be established and generously visualized.
(b) start large scale advertising campaigns together with these documentaries along the line "... our companies would have established xxx thousand jobs in the US if we would have not been forced by lobbying to finance the squandering lifestyles of the very few that are abusing the patent system..."
/* call that throwing around dirt - well that seems to be the language our politicians e.a. immediately understand */
Step 2: Patent laws can already be rendered nil today based on national security concerns - we need something similar in the interest of the (real) economy:
(a) all profits / royalties / fees from patent licensing are taxed at the double or at least maximum income rate due immediately when the money flows - all offshore entities are barred from receiving any funds before these taxes are paid - this is to insure that patents are used defensively and not to monopolize complete business sectors or extort huge sums from those actually creating products by NPEs.
(b) all additionally collected taxes from this are earmarked to support startups / SMEs in defending against patent litigations or generally as start-up funding
Step 3: The patent system is being reformed and all previously granted software, plants / DNA patents reviewed. Patent reviews might be prioritized e.g. by large number of requests, overwhelming prior art, clear obviousness of the invention etc.
(a) all software patents have to be demonstrated with a functional model / prototype - the application of the prototype defines the application of the patent.
(b) While these reviews or changes to the patent system are ongoing, patents claims are evaluated in all litigations in the strictest sense of the actual application / apparatus described and no (overly) broad adaption are allowed like today e.g. patents for doing xxx in telephone switching solutions blocking the same things 15 years later on the web.
In an optimal implementation these changes are coordinated / also implemented in other leading economies rendering the possibilities to circumvent or block these measures unprofitable.
A historical side-note: In times of dire economies whenever the "rulers" of countries have seen benefit from innovation, creating of new industries and companies, they have relaxed the patent laws that overall in history almost all the time have been used merely to create monopolies or protect existing monopolies from competition. My best example for this is the rise of Prussia to one of the globally leading industrial nations from a farm based economy and the parallel downfall of the UK from leading the first industrial / technology revolution.
Now I'm almost certain that most of the above will never happen due to the vested interests / special interest groups involved or benefiting substantially from the current situation, but it would be nice to at least see some reason in the use of patent law again.
Of course, the "toughness" is in trying to preserve financial incentives and profit, when maybe we should all just be motivated for the better of humanity and to make the world a better place? But maybe that's the folly of man and we are asking too much. In which case as a species we get what comes to us.
I think that's enough existentialism for one night.
*silly iPad autocorrecT
Anything that is truly new technology is often kept as a trade secret. In software, patents are only great for defense.
Hey, respond to scum with scum. Of course it's just a fantasy.
Edit: Company, not Computer.