Here's A Surprise: Red Hat Wins Patent Lawsuit In East Texas
from the didn't-see-that-coming dept
It's so rare that we post about a good patent ruling coming out of East Texas that it seems worth highlighting that they do happen. The latest is that Red Hat won after being sued by a patent hoarder, who claimed that every version of Linux infringed on its patents. The jury found that the patents in question were invalid and tossed them out. You may recall that we actually wrote about this lawsuit when it was filed, noting that the company who filed it, IP Innovation, was actually one of many shell companies representing Acacia, which for many years has been a leader in hoarding patents and suing companies who actually innovate. We also noted at the time that the patents in question seemed highly questionable. The fact that even a jury (which tends to find patents valid the majority of the time) found the patents ridiculous is pretty telling.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: east texas, linux, patents, software patents
Companies: acacia, ip innovation, novell, red hat
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Mike, the politically correct term is patent maximizer.
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A Daniel Come to Judgment.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100430223358785
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Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
Aha! Yeah, I had seen that Judge Rader was handling a whole bunch of cases down in East Texas this session, and I'm glad to see he's having an impact.
Separately, a patent attorney I know was saying that he had a case that was supposed to go before Judge Rader last month, but once they realized that Rader was hearing the case the patent holder that was suing quickly came back with a much lower settlement offer.
Looks like he's cleaning up some of the East Texas mess.
Wonder if he'd be willing to take a demotion to being there full time? :)
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Re: Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
To imply that perhaps Judge Davis has a possible bias that leans towards patent holders is, in my opinion, inappropriate. He is a respected jurist.
As for the constant characterization of the FDC for the ED of Texas as being pro-patent, data collected by Dennis Crouch at Patently-O undermines such a characterization.
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Re: Re: Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
Second, can you provide a link to the data to which you refer? It seems strange that so many patent horders would go to the trouble of filing in that district if it wasn't beneficial.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
Exactly.
Second, can you provide a link to the data to which you refer? It seems strange that so many patent horders would go to the trouble of filing in that district if it wasn't beneficial.
Indeed. I'm curious to see the data, as well, because the latest date I've seen, which we wrote about here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100127/2100057953.shtml showed that East Texas was incredibly friendly to plaintiffs.
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Re: Re: Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
Davis needs to be tarred and feathered and ran out of the state. He's an embarrassment to every other Texan.
The fact that patent trolls like to head straight to him is a clear sign of bias. You have to be an idiot or have something to gain from his bias not to see it and call him out on it.
Calling Judge Davis the patent trolls b*tch is entirely appropriate.
The fact that he doesn't smack down the trolls just for the act of venue shopping in and of itself should be embarrasing for any other Texan. He should send their carpet bagging *sses back where they came from.
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Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
The product over which Redhat was being sued came out of academia and has significant functional differences from MacOS. The meat of those differences is primarily what these patents were about. X likely had already impemented those features by the time the relevant patents were filed.
Not every GUI is a copy of the Mac. X is a very good example of that.
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Re: Re: A Daniel Come to Judgment.
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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919
I found it interesting that even Lemley was surprised that much of the data suggests that plaintiff and defendant counsel are making decisions that do not appear to square with the data obtained thus far.
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That's an oxymoron. Heck, IP doesn't even claim to stimulate innovation, it claims to stimulate "invention" and even then that's still not true.
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The fact that the patent office even granted such bogus patents alone is telling.
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truth about trolls
Call it what you will...patent hoarder, patent troll, non-practicing entity, etc. It all means one thing: “we’re using your invention and we’re not going to pay”.
For the truth about trolls, please see http://truereform.piausa.org.
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