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Google loses a $5 million Linux patent verdict
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google has been found to have infringed a patent held by a private firm with code in its Linux codebase.
Bedrock Computer Technologies (BCT) managed to wrangle a verdict out of a Texas jury that not only gives it $5 million in damages from Google but, more worryingly, a possible foundation to launch other attacks on software that uses a relatively basic data structure. The patent in question relates to the use of a linked list data structure to expire data.
Google's battle against BCT was supported by Red Hat, one of the largest distributors of Linux, however its interaction with the court didn't yield the results Red Hat had hoped for. BCT, in the meantime, has all but shut up shop, with some claiming that it was only set up to acquire patents and pursue litigation.
Google is expected to appeal the decision, since the East Texas court in which the verdict was delivered has become notorious for upholding questionable patents. However it's not just the court that should be under the spotlight, as it almost beggars belief that a patent on such a fundamental and universally taught data structure, a linked list, was ever granted in the first place.
Technically if Google does lose any appeal, it could leave the door ajar for BCT to awake from its slumber and continue its patent litigation. However the ultimate losers will be all software developers, who might have to live in fear of facing litigation for implementing the most basic of programming concepts. µ
Tags: Google
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IF SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE VALID THEN THAT OPENS THE DOOR FOR OPPORTUNITY. SO WHAT - IF ANY OF YOU HAVE ANY WORTHWHILE, PATENTABLE IDEAS THEN WHY WOULDN'T YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION?
AS FOR YOUR OLD EXAMPLES OF PRIOR ART, WHAT ARE YOU GUYS, NUTS? GOOGLE HAS BILLIONZ OF DOLLARZ AND MOUNTAINZ OF LAWYERZ TO FIGURE THIS OUT. I AM QUITE CERTAIN THEY DON'T NEED ANY HELP FROM THE LIKES OF -YOU- GUYS.
The lawyers that defended this (are idiots) should have bought in one of my college text books (eg. Knuffe - or any one of a hundred papers generated in the 1960's) showing that a) BCT did not invent the concept and b) the Patent Rights Protection of 20 years has long since past.
I'm pretty sure a copy of any of the OS's from the 60's and 70's from the top 2 companies (IBM, DEC) had link lists in them - not to mention the 100's of compilers, and accounting SW of the day.
I assumed the plaintiff picked Texas for a good reason.
To any and all Europeans reading this article: this is why you should make sure that software patents are NOT allowed in Europe. This type of silliness is about to destroy the software development ecosystem in this country. It's no wonder that a lot of actual development is done outside of the USA nowadays.
Software patents are out of control.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry about this verdict. There are quite literally thousands of examples of this sort of thing being done over the last 50 years (it probably dates back even earlier).
I wrote a Deque subroutine in IBM Assembly Language many years ago that implements double linked-list structures of stacks and queues, and still have a copy.
Lawyers for Google and Red Hat have been informed. But there must be lots of other prior art out there, too.
I would be amazed if some Inquirer reader hasn't once written some code somewhere that used a linked-list to expire some data (an age based cache, for example). I know I did something similar for a client, but it's not public domain, nor my property.
All we need to do is find a decent example of "prior art" and the case is invalid.