Sun Pays Off Kodak On Patent

from the that's-what-you-get dept

Last week, just a day after Sun's Jonathan Schwartz insisted that Sun absolutely believed in software patents, they got hit with a loss in a software patent case brought against them by Kodak. As we said at the time, if you live by the software patent, you die by the software patent. Well, it looks like Sun wanted to get that story out of the news as quickly as possible, so they took some of that settlement cash from Microsoft and have tossed it over to Kodak to settle the case -- most likely for significantly less than the $1.6 billion Kodak wanted. Update: Indeed, now the reports are saying that Sun paid $92 million to settle. That's a bit short of $1.6 billion. Now let's see how quickly Kodak wastes it.
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  • identicon
    Steve Mueller, 7 Oct 2004 @ 5:05pm

    Innovation?

    More importantly, let's see the innovative products that Kodak has produced that use these patents. If they haven't produced any, why do they need protection?

    I also find it surprising that Sun rolled over on this. Either they really believe they infringed on the patent, their legal bills would have exceeded $92 million (!) or this is a political move to show how much they believe in software patents. I wonder which one, though....

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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