

Patent Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop - ukdm
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/13/troll-sues-facebook-amazon-and-others-for-using-hadoop/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

======
mindstab
What if (somewhat borrowing an idea from PG actually, but I think this might
be a bit more feasible) big tech companies started retaliating against trolls
and lawyers who support them by banning them from their services. These guys
(lawyer's site) have a linkedin link on the front page. What if they were
banned from that.

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?

~~~
edouard1234567
This reminds me of the cold war. Big powerful countries growing their arsenal
of WOMD to dissuade each other from attacking. Using them against the other
side would mean self destruction, so instead they agree they won't let any
other country get them : non proliferation treaties... . But this only works
when you have something to loose that's why we are so afraid of fanatics
getting their hands on WOMDs, they can't be dissuaded and these treaties have
no effect on them. Today big tech companies amass patents of mass destruction
(POMD) to dissuade each other from suing. Unfortunately this doesn't work
against patent trolls because they have nothing to lose. So what you are
suggesting is a kind of patriot act against the "technology terrorists" and
start a war against patent trolling! :)

~~~
firebones
I think you're describing asymmetric warfare. Study of countermeasures for
asymmetric warfare would be fertile ground for learning how to counteract the
trolls.

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?

------
georgemcbay
I'm curious why Google isn't on the list?

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.

~~~
rit
Probably because Google clearly has prior art.

The initial white papers about Google Filesystem were presented in 2003:
<http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=945450>

~~~
tzs
One of the patents was filed in 2002, so 2003 is not early enough to be prior
art.

------
Zenst
The way those patents are worded, they could equaly apply to TCP/IP,
switch's/routers, any HA system and many more previously used technologies out
there predating this drivil. There a load of bollocks and how they got
allocated patents is in itself a case for the aformentioned companies havinga
right to sue the patent office for incompetance.

~~~
monochromatic
I'm guessing you haven't read the claims?

~~~
gergles
Why is this bullshit platitude always a response to anyone complaining about a
patent? The claims for software patents almost never provide anything more
than the abstract, just in a few hundred more words.

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.

~~~
Zenst
In all fairness he is right I hadn't read the claims in full so I gave him a
+1 for that. But as I explained I read the patents which are the basis for the
claims.

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.

------
fpp
Enough ranting lets get constructive before those xxx have ruined our industry
completely.

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.

------
abhaga
Who are the four people who were originally granted the patent? I tried
searching for them but all I got were either patent grants or the news about
them suing other companies. I am interested in finding out the technical
credentials of these inventors.

------
alttab
Hopefully enough of these get thrown out so the trolling will stop. Then we
just have to worry about people stealing your technology overnight and turning
every new innovation into a perfectly competitive market. I'm not being
snarky, I think it's a tough problem to solve.

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

~~~
ljd
Taking the position that non-patented work could be stolen overnight is an
irrational, yet strangely a pervasive fear in software. It's why new
entrepreneurs push NDA's on their initial contacts. It's been my experience
that there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into building a successful
tech company.

Anything that is truly new technology is often kept as a trade secret. In
software, patents are only great for defense.

------
emperorcezar
Sometimes I fantasize about a company with a lot of buying power, like Amazon,
retaliating by hiring some mob thugs to break a few legs.

Hey, respond to scum with scum. Of course it's just a fantasy.

Edit: Company, not Computer.

~~~
timaelliott
I fantasize about computers too. I tried to picture clusters of information as
they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles?
Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd
never see.

------
rhizome
Charles Carreon is selling an ebook of his experiences for $5MM a copy.

------
keymone
sometimes i think patent laws should be a bit more strict. like execute patent
trolls and their families just to keep human genome a bit cleaner..

