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Texas jury finds Google infringes a patent: $5,000,000 damage award
- jrockway 15y agoThis is one of the disadvantages of open-source software: the patent trolls can easily find places that are violating their bullshit patents. I'm sure Microsoft and Apple also use linked lists, but they're not being sued, because it's harder to prove.
- shareme 15y agoare we actually sure of what is being reported??... he has miss-reported before
- ggeorgovassilis 15y agoAbout some files in the JDK copied [1] from Sun/Oracle. I think that was, to put it in Wikipedia terms "original research" and that's always risky. Florian was right about the files but his conclusions about the gravity of those findings were wrong as they were not shipped in the end-product. [1] http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-evidence-supports-oracles-case.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-evidence-support...
- tzs 15y agoThis is ridiculous. The author has a long and excellent record fighting against software patents. On a couple of occasions his analysis may have been an error, but I don't think he's ever mis-reported anything. You comment is just FUD.
- orangecat 15y agoThere's a good chance that he's a paid anti-Google shill: http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/ http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/. Note that in this case he immediately jumps from the verdict to "Android is doomed", when the case had nothing to do with Android specifically except that it uses Linux, as do millions of other products.
- jstedfast 15y agoHow does that prove he's an anti-Google "shill", exactly?
- cookiecaper 15y agoI disagree. I'm also looking for a better source. Florian Mueller has a very bad reputation and was the guy behind "Boycott Novell".
- tzs 15y agoRoy Schestowitz is the guy behind "Boycott Novell". The only connection Florian Mueller has to Boycott Novell is that Boycott Novell calls him "Microsoft Florian" and constantly accuses him of working for Microsoft.
- cookiecaper 15y agoAh, you're right. Thank you for the correction, I had conflated the two, probably because I hear them both maligned often, or maybe I read another incorrect statement some time ago. Nevertheless, Florian Mueller is still a controversial figure and has incorrectly reported in the past (see here: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1939165/mueller-forced-android-copyright-infringement-claims http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1939165/mueller-for... ). Something like groklaw would be better, but the story isn't showing up there at the moment.
- kenjackson 15y agoThe thing with Florian is that he's never always on one side of the story. Unlike Groklaw, where they openly admit to being in pain if they have to side with MS on a case.
- burgerbrain 15y agoActually, it's pretty trivial to figure out what side of something Florian is going to be on: just reverse whatever opinion Groklaw happens to voice. Seriously, check out that guys HN account and look at his comments on any article having anything to do with Groklaw. Totally unhealthy obsession.
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- naner 15y ago> The author has a long and excellent record fighting against software patents. Based on what? All we have is your (and his) assertion. I had trouble finding any history at all of this guy with "25 years software industry experience". And every single one of his blog posts portrays FOSS software as an unreliable IP minefield. Even if that's not the specific legal issue at hand. In my opinion this looks like he is paid to smear FOSS.
- jstedfast 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller According to Wikipedia: "In 2004, Müller received the support of corporate sponsors 1&1, Red Hat and MySQL for launching NoSoftwarePatents.com, which opposed the European Commission's proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.[8] Following several years of intensive lobbying by many parties, this proposed directive was rejected by the European Parliament on July 6, 2005, with 648 out of 680 votes cast.[9][10] For his political activities, Müller received several awards in 2005. A leading publication for intellectual property lawyers, "Managing Intellectual Property", counted Müller - such as the Chinese vice premier Wu Yi - among the "top 50 most influential people in intellectual property"[11][12] (renominated in 2006[13]). IT-focused website Silicon.com listed him among the Silicon Agenda Setters.[14] A jury of EU-focused weekly newspaper "European Voice" elected Müller as one of the "EV50 Europeans of the Year 2005", and handed him the "EU Campaigner of the Year 2005" award.[15] Jointly with the FFII, Müller received the "CNET Networks UK Technology Award" in the "Outstanding Contribution to Software Development" category.[16]"
- yuhong 15y agoAnother example of this: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110420141724403 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110420141724403
- z0r 15y agoWhat a perfectly ridiculous patent.
- tzs 15y agoI find it hard to believe that in the time between the story appearing and your comment you had time to read and understand the patent.
- z0r 15y agoAdmittedly, I only read up to the end of the claims section here: 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=5,893,120.PN.&OS=PN/5,893,120&RS=PN/5,893,120 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec... If you read those and skim to see passages like these: "The problem, then, is to provide the speed of access of hashing techniques for large, heavily used information storage systems having expiring data and, at the same time, prevent the performance degradation resulting from the accumulation of many expired records. Although a hashing technique for dealing with expiring data is known and disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,495, issued Jun. 9, 1992, that technique is confined to linear probing and is entirely inapplicable to external chaining. The procedure shown there traverses, in reverse order, a consecutive sequence of records residing in the hash table array, continually relocating unexpired records to fill gaps left by the removal of expired ones. Unlike arrays, linked lists leave no gaps when items from it are removed, and furthermore it is not possible to efficiently traverse a singly linked list in reverse order. There are significant advantages to external chaining over linear probing that sometimes make it the method of choice, as discussed in considerable detail in the aforementioned texts, and so hashing techniques for dealing with expiring data that do not use external chaining prove wholly inadequate for certain applications. For example, if the data records are large, considerable memory can be saved using external chaining instead of linear probing. Accordingly, there is a need to develop hashing techniques for external chaining with expiring data. The methods of the above-mentioned patent are limited to arrays and cannot be used with linked lists due to the significant difference in the organization of the computer's memory." The triviality of the patent should be fairly evident (but if I've jumped to a bad conclusion, I'm happy to be corrected). Fair point though!
- drallison 15y agoI did a quick read of the patent, 5,893,120 filed in 1997. It seems likely to me to be invalid over the prior art.
- kenjackson 15y agoThe jury dismissed Google's invalidity defense. This is a case where re-examination might be better. A lot of juries simply may not feel comfortable overturning the PTO, even with a lower standard of proof.
- epenn 15y agoHere is a link to the full text of the patent in question: 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=5,893,120.PN.&OS=PN/5,893,120&RS=PN/5,893,120 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
- tzs 15y agoSome people have trouble viewing images at the PTO site. Here's a copy as a PDF: http://www.scribd.com/doc/53561493/Pat-5893120 http://www.scribd.com/doc/53561493/Pat-5893120 This was generated by the excellent site pat2pdf.org, which I highly recommend for those who want convenient copies of patents.
- owls 15y agoThis illustrates a serious problem with the American judicial system, and copyright law. Not only are people allowed to file vague patents.. I mean this is vague. This is akin to patenting a sidewalk, or a stop sign. The fate of the accused is decided by a panel of LAYMEN. It would make more sense if the jury was at least composed of people of known technical competence.
- kenjackson 15y agoThe award is peanuts for Google. But establishes a scary precedent. Basically everyone had get ready to give this company effectively a license fee for past shipments of Linux-based products.
- strlen 15y agoA patent for searching a linked list? This is disgusting. As a middle finger, here's me infringing on it. typedef struct node { struct node *next; void *data; } node_t; void *find(node_t *head, void *what, int (*cmp)(void *, void *)) { while(*head != NULL && cmp(head->data, what) != 0) { head = head->next; } return head; } Of course, there is an age old infringer on this patent: (define (find ll what) (if (or (null? ll) (eq? (car ll) what)) ll (find (cdr ll) what)))
- piotrSikora 15y agoYou didn't read the patent, did you?
- strlen 15y agoI did, the only part my code sample doesn't involve is expiring the oldest record, which is: void expire(node_t **head) { node_t *next = (*head)->next; free(*head); *head = next; } In terms of using a linked list as an LRU cache, this is done in the Java SDK by LinkedHashMap: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/LinkedHashMap.html http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Linke... http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/jdk/openjdk/6-b14/java/util/LinkedHashMap.java http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/j...
- piotrSikora 15y agoExcept that the patent doesn't do any "expiring of the oldest record" and it's not LRU.
- fragmede 15y agoThe patent includes expiring the records in the linked list, and removing (some) expired records when doing the search: #define EXPIRE_LOOKUPS 500 typedef struct node { struct node *next; void *data; int age; } node_t; void *find(node_t *head, void *what, int (*cmp)(void *, void *)) { while(*head != NULL && cmp(head->data, what) != 0) { if (head->next == NULL) return NULL; if (head->next->age > EXPIRE_LOOKUPS) head->next = head->next->next; ++head->age; head = head->next; } return head; } (I didn't see the patent specify an actual expiry mechanism in any specific detail, so here's a useless, but patent-infringing one.)
- guelo 15y agoWhat is the problem with that east Texas district?
- tzs 15y agoNothing. There's a common myth on the internet that it massively favors patent plaintiffs, but in reality it isn't even in the top five. There are two reasons so many patent suits are filed there. 1. It has judges that have experience with patent suits and like handling them. Whether you are plaintiff or defendant, you want this. 2. There isn't much federal crime there. Criminal cases always take precedent over civil cases on the court calendar. In some districts, especially those where the stupid "war on drugs" is highly active, it can take a long long time to get any court time for civil cases.
- leftnode 15y agoBasically a pissed off judge - http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/16280/page1/ http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/16280/page1/
- Natsu 15y agoIt's a rocket docket. So cases move through very quickly. And many of the rulings have been very patent-friendly. There aren't very many judges in that district, either, as I recall. Now, you will find stats saying that patent holders don't win disproportionately often there. What those leave out is how many EDT cases settle beforehand. Basically, only the strongest cases even go to trial there and they still lose about half the time. I can't remember if there's a rule requiring local counsel or not, but I know that several firms have set up shop in or near Marshall, Texas.
- joeyh 15y agoThe title here on Hacker News has been mangled to be incomprehensible or just wrong. This is not a "Linux patent", it is a software patent which is potentially infringed by the Linux kernel.
- alecco 15y agoMisleading title, dubious blog. This is an anti-Google/Android blogger with likely ties to Google competitors. http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/ http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428188 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428188
- Natsu 15y agoI don't see what the author has to do with it. It links to the relevant patents & court files so you can read them yourself. They just won a judgment against Google for using Linux. Granted, it was in East Texas, but that's where all the trolls file. This is exactly why software patents should not be allowed. I hope the patent gets invalidated soon.
- sbov 15y agoI hate reading patents because I always feel like they try to make it look as complicated as possible. In particular, I always find the inclusion of the computer architecture somewhat useless. Do we really care that there might be 25 software applications running on your computer? Is there any reason other than overcomplication (and thus making the patent appear more novel) to include this stuff? Because of this, I just want to make sure I understand the patent properly: From what I can tell, its a patent on a hash table that resolves collisions using chaining, implemented using linked lists. On top of this, each entry has an expiration time and it can remove them as it does lookups for entries.
- kenjackson 15y agoIn particular, I always find the inclusion of the computer architecture somewhat useless. Do we really care that there might be 25 software applications running on your computer? I think the reason for this is that it moves the patent from an idea/algorithm to one that runs on a physically manifested device.
- neilk 15y agoIn the USA, software patentability has always been dubious. But you can patent a complete physical setup that also runs software. So software patents are usually written as if one had invented some special-purpose device, that just happens to consist of hardware that looks remarkably like a standard PC, running software.
- jws 15y agoI'm not seeing which part of the Linux kernel is afflicted, but this exhibit from an Amazon case at least suggests that it is for the route cache. http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/txedce/6:2009cv00269/116887/579/5.pdf http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/t... If so, it should be easy to excise from future kernels with minimal performance impact. (I was suspecting filesystem entry caches, but that doesn't show up when I google.) In a perfect world the patent would not have been issued since it is obvious to anyone skilled in the art that considers when to purge expired entries from a hash table with linked list overflow, especially in a world where systems are constrained by memory access times more than computation. But we are not legislated by that world.
- naner 15y agoSo here we go again. Last time there was a highly voted fosspatents article here it was completely bogus. And everyone chimed in about how this guy had ulterior motives: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355056
- gregburek 15y agoI think that Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership, which was argued before the Supreme Court on April 18, may change how this plays out in the end. "Since 1983, the courts have followed a clear, firm rule: In order to overcome the statutory presumption that a patent is valid, a litigant must provide clear and convincing evidence that a patent is invalid. That's a high hurdle to overcome. ... Many observers expect the Supreme Court will reject the current bright-line rule and, at least under some circumstances, make it easier for parties to attack the validity of patents." - http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/court_may_make_it_easier_to_invalidate_an_invention/ http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/court_may_make_it... Previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453895 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453895 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464698 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464698