Google Fined $5 Million in Linux Patent Case
Google Fined $5 Million in Linux Patent Case
Posted 04/22/2011 at 4:55pm
| by Pulkit Chandna
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If Google is one of the most prominent Linux stalwarts around, Android is undoubtedly the public face of its love affair with the open source operating system. But its Linux affection runs deeper than that as the Internet behemoth uses the OS on everything from back-end servers to employee machines. Now, that deep-rooted love is beginning to cost Google, for a jury has fined it $5 million for infringing on a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,893,120) held by Texas-bases patent troll Bedrock Computer Technologies.
Google was not the only company sued by Bedrock for the infringement of the said patent, but a lot of other companies that use Linux for their operations, including Yahoo!, Amazon, Paypal, AOL and Match.com, were named as defendants in the suit filed in 2009. Bedrock alleges that many versions of the Linux kernel infringe on the patent-in-suit.
While many experts see this decision as having far-reaching consequences for the open source community and Google, others like ZDNet's Linux and open source blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols are baffled by the “idiotic anti-Linux & Google decision.” That said, Vaughan-Nicholas, like many others, isn't too surprised that the decision has come from a court notorious for its pro-patent stance: the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX).
The big G, meanwhile, has vowed to fight on: “Google will continue to defend against attacks like this one on the open source community. The recent explosion in patent litigation is turning the world’s information highway into a toll road, forcing companies to spend millions and millions of dollars defending old, questionable patent claims, and wasting resources that would be much better spent investing in new technologies for users and creating jobs.”
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aarcane
April 23, 2011 at 12:23pm
wqant to see another foolish patent? http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=markup&s2=display&OS=markup+AND+display&RS=markup+AND+display
sudo has been providing all of this functionality for.. how long? certainly longer than 2008...
BAMT
April 23, 2011 at 3:17pm
That looks a lot like chroot jails to me. (Nice trolling of M$ since they just got it.)
Edit: You're right, too. It looks like a two-in-one.
aarcane
April 23, 2011 at 12:16pm
I read the "Patent", and that's basic computer science 101, that's stuff taught in entry level science at my community college, and insofar as I know, it's been taught since before 1997, though I wasn't around to learn it then...
immersive
April 23, 2011 at 10:05am
patent/copyright should last 30 years then its all free for anyone to use. If you can't make money on your idea or work in 30 years everyone should be able to use it then for free at no cost. Didn't our forefathers set all this up to be like 15 years or something? Where did this all go wrong. I bet it was some super rich company that got everything changed. No I have not done my research.
Raswan
April 23, 2011 at 10:12am
It was 7 years. And Edison was the first sorry sob who had to face the reality of patent wars.
Brdn666
April 23, 2011 at 9:46am
http://www.google.com/patents?id=X4QXAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false
Did you know that google has a patent search? The more you know
Keith E. Whisman
April 23, 2011 at 7:12am
We need to kick East Texas out of the Union. They are so damn strange. I'm pretty sure they believe ever light in the sky that moves must be aliens and that 9-11 was an inside job.
kixofmyg0t
April 22, 2011 at 6:20pm
This may sound stupid....but how can you patent something that's open source and supposedly "free"???
I put in a patent for nitrogen years and years ago. It was worded so fanstastic that it doesn't really even sound like nitrogen.
I'm gonna sue every single person on the planet for consuming MY patented product in a few years. Yup.
BAMT
April 22, 2011 at 6:34pm
It's one of those vague patents:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5893120.PN.&OS=PN/5893120&RS=PN/5893120
I think the patent vaguely describes every web cache server.
kixofmyg0t
April 22, 2011 at 6:57pm
Wow....after reading that over I discovered that *I*, along with everyone reading this, and everyone that has every used any software of any kind in their existance.....is violating this patent.
This guy basically patented cache, as well as basically EVERY I/O operation.....
cj100570
April 22, 2011 at 5:54pm
I'm baffled by this dicision too. How can you rule that Google is infringing when the validity and ownership of the patent hasn't even been resolved?!
Danthrax66
April 22, 2011 at 5:45pm
Fuck these assholes trying to patent the linux kernel. This country is fucked because we only have retards running it (Republican and Democrat) and have for years. We need to rewrite all patent/copyright laws.
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